Terror and Irish Modernism offers a synoptic overview of modern Irish fiction. Covering more than two centuries of literary production, Jim Hansen locates the root structure of modern Irish fiction in the masculine gender anxiety of one of the nineteenth century’s most popular literary genres: the Gothic. Addressing both the decolonization of Ireland and the politics of literary form, Hansen sheds new light on canonical works by Maria Edgeworth, C. R. Maturin, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett by reading them all as part of the generic tradition of the Irish Gothic. He focuses in particular on how the Irish Gothic tradition translated the English Gothic’s female-confinement narrative into a story about confined, feminized male protagonists. In reading this male gender-disorientation as the foundational condition of modern Irish political identity, Terror and Irish Modernism provides a thoroughly new genealogy of modern Irish fiction.
Author(s): Jim Hansen
Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 209
1438428219......Page 1
Terror and Irish Modernism......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
Acknowledgments......Page 9
1. Gothic Double Binds, Or,Irish Terrorists Confrontan Unholy Union......Page 13
2. The Wrong Marriage: Maturin and the Double Logic of Masculinity in the Unionist Gothic......Page 39
3. The Revolution Within: Wilde’s Gothic and the Confines of Convention......Page 71
4. Overcoming Allegory: Joyce’s Ulysses and the Limits of the Irish Gothic......Page 99
5. Engendering a Cartesian Gothic: Generic Form as History in Beckett’s Fiction......Page 137
EPI LOGUE: The Poetics of Fear: Gothic Inheritance at the End of Modernity......Page 181
Notes......Page 187
Bibliography......Page 205
B......Page 217
G......Page 218
M......Page 219
V......Page 220
Z......Page 221
