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Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Seán O'Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.
Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality and hybrid forms to create textual realities that either run in opposition to or in parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that use the aspects already noted to more fully engage with political or cultural realities; texts that deal with history as a fiction; and texts that elude categorization even within the variety already explored. For example, in fiction, a postmodernist novel might tell a story about a writer struggling with writing (only, perhaps, to find that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write a book). The A to Z of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and the variety of forms that have been produced. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this reference explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century operates.
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this book’s argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevens’s poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed O’Loughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevens’s literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of “world literature” as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.
The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.
This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O’Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.
Intended as a response to the publication The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991, this collection of essays examines: the canonical status of writers, such as Joyce, Yeats and Beckett; how postcolonial theory and criticism have reshaped the boundaries of Irish Studies; and how women's writing has challenged canonicity as a concept.
This work analyses the prose and drama of the Irish writer Tom Mac Intyre and the concept of paleo-postmodernism. It examines how Mac Intyre balances traditional themes with experimentation, which in the Irish literary canon is unusual. This book argues that Mac Intyre’s position in the Irish literary canon is an idiosyncratic one in that he combines two contrary aspects of Irish literature: between what Beckett terms as the Yeatsian ‘antiquarians’ who valorize the ‘Victorian Gael’ and the ‘others’ whose aesthetic involves a European-influenced ‘breakdown of the object’ which is associated with Beckett. Mac Intyre’s experimentation involves a breakdown of the object in order to uncover an unconscious Irish mythological and linguistic space in language. His approach to language experimentation is Yeatsian and this is what the author terms as paleo-postmodern. Thus the project considers how Mac Intyre incorporates Yeatsian revivalism with postmodern deconstruction in his drama and short stories.
Literature and Ethics covers a wide gamut of literary periods and genres, including essays on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as several studies on narrative, but the central ethos emerges from considerations of issues of responsibility and irresponsibility as they find expression in literary study, and in ethics. Students and academics who are interested in literary theory, ethics, narrative form, and issues of authorial responsibility, and how such matters inform the reading of literary texts, will find that this collection offers a wide array of approaches and viewpoints by major figures from the relevant sub-disciplines in literary studies. The collection offers much-timely critical observation on a variety of contemporary authors but also provides critically adventurous commentaries on Victorian literature, and on Indian, African, Irish, and Australian literature. The volume assembles a collection of essays that would illustrate the great diversity of methods by which considerations of responsibility can and do offer insight into a range of literary texts, and theoretical discourses, while also making a contribution to the philosophical question of responsibility (and irresponsibility) in the contemporary world. The collection as a whole testifies to the human fascination with issues of responsibility, just as it testifies to the necessity of posing questions of responsibility as questions of ethics and literature, the necessity of recognizing, in other words, that "responsibility" names a concept whose only ground is the history of those fictional narratives of responsibility and irresponsibility that modern civilization would do well to continue inventing and reflecting upon critically. So whether ethical discourses find expression in theoretical debate--or in and through the sophisticated fictions that constitute an imaginative culture--what is clear, both from wider discussions related to the value of literary texts that are such a central part of contemporary literary studies, and from the varied and nuanced arguments that are made in this collection, is that questions of responsibility are central to literature, philosophy, and the arts, just as they are to the social realities that spawned them in the first place. Literature and Ethics is an important book for all literature and literary theory collections. It has specific resonance for students and teachers who are interested in the value of literary study, and in questions of ethics and narrative.