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.
Author(s): Liam Harte (editor)
Series: (Oxford Handbooks)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 704
Tags: English Literature, Modern Irish Fiction, Modernism, Irish Literature, Irish Fiction, Ireland
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Contributors
Editorial Note
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: Modern Irish Fiction: Renewing the Art of the New
Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Legacies
Irish Revivalism and Irish Modernism
After the Revival, in Joyce’s Wake
Fiction in the Modernizing Republic and the Troubled North
Irish Genre Fiction
Fact into Fiction, Fiction into Film
Crossings and Crosscurrents
Contemporary Irish Fiction
Critical Evaluations
Part II: Nineteenth Century Contexts and Legacies
Chapter 2: Irish Gothic Fiction
Early Irish Gothic: Slaying Monsters from Within
Irish Catholic Gothic after 1922: Resurrecting the Monstrous
Further Reading
Chapter 3: Nation, Gender, and Genre: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Development of Irish Fiction
Further Reading
Chapter 4: Shame is the Spur: Novels by Irish Catholics, 1873–1922
Further Reading
Part III: Irish Revivalism and Irish Modernism
Chapter 5: George Moore: Gender, Place, and Narrative
The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Sex and Method
Modernist Metropolitanism and the Regional Subject
Narrating Gender and Place
Further Reading
Chapter 6: Revival Fiction: Proclaiming the Future
Emily Lawless’s Hurrish and Grania
Shan Bullock’s Ring o’ Rushes and Irish Pastorals
George Moore’s The Untilled Field
W. B. Yeats’s The Secret Rose and James Joyce’s Dubliners
Further Reading
Chapter 7: The Materialist-Fabulist Dialectic: James Stephens, Eimar O’Duffy, and Magic Naturalism
The Writers’ Background and Intellectual Formation
Establishing the Prototype: James Stephens’s Early Magic Naturalist Fiction
Revising the Prototype: Eimar O’Duffy’s Cuanduine Trilogy
Further Reading
Chapter 8: Epic Modernism: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
Further Reading
Chapter 9: The Parallax of Irish-Language Modernism, 1900–1940
Pádraic Ó Conaire’s Deoraíocht: The Disintegration of a Displaced Being
Subaltern Oracles Speak: The Rise of the Gaeltacht Autobiography
Seosamh Mac Grianna: A Disruptive Articulation of Being
Further Reading
Part IV: After the Revival, in Joyce's Wake
Chapter 10: Lethal in Two Languages: Narrative Form and Cultural Politics in the Fiction of Flann O’Brien and Máirtín Ó Cadhain
Language, Form, and Tradition
Legacies and Afterlives
Further Reading
Chapter 11: Effing the Ineffable: Samuel Beckett’s Narrators
Beckett and Joyce
The Turn to French
The Trilogy, Translation, and Ireland
Further Reading
Chapter 12: Obliquities: Elizabeth Bowen and the Modern Short Story
A Poetics of the Short Story
National Imprint and the Irish Short Story
Obliquity
Further Reading
Chapter 13: The Role andRepresentation of Betrayal in the Irish Short Story since Dubliners
The Short Story: A Minor Form?
Betrayal in Dubliners
Public Betrayal after Joyce
Private Betrayal after Joyce
Further Reading
Chapter 14: Arrows in Flight: Success and Failure in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction
Frank O’Connor
Seán O’Faoláin
Mary Lavin
Further Reading
Chapter 15: ‘Proud of Our WeeUlster’? Writing Region and Identity in Ulster Fiction
Critical Contexts
Stimuli and Influences
St John Ervine, Janet McNeill, Brian Moore, and Sam Hanna Bell
Further Reading
Part V: Fiction in the Modernizing Republic and the Troubled North
Chapter 16: Edna O’Brien and the Politics of Belatedness
Gender, Authorship, and Critical Reception
Liminality and the Quest for Irish Womanhood
Rewriting the Joycean Epiphany
Further Reading
Chapter 17: ‘Half-Arsed Modern’: John McGahern and the Failed State
Further Reading
Chapter 18: John Banville’s Fictions of Art
Further Reading
Chapter 19: Sex and Violence in Northern Irish Women’s Fiction
‘What is the Colour of Shame?’: Living with Extremes of Love and Hate during the Troubles
‘She was Always Bracing Herself’: Navigating Intimacy in ‘Post-Conflict’ Northern Ireland
Further Reading
Part VI: Irish Genre Fiction
Chapter 20: Irish Crime Fiction
Further Reading
Chapter 21: Irish Science Fiction
The Nineteenth Century
Revolution and Independence
Revival and Recession
Hunting the Tiger
Further Reading
Chapter 22: House, Land, and Family Life: Children’s Fiction and Irish Homes
The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
The 1930s and 1940s
The 1950s and 1960s
The Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
Further Reading
Part VII: Fact into Fiction, Fiction into Film
Chapter 23: The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015
Further Reading
Chapter 24: The 1916 Rising in the Story of Ireland
Early Fictional Responses to the Rising
The Rising and the First World War
The Rising and the Family Saga
The Rising and Narratives of Homosexual Desire
Further Reading
Chapter 25: Irish Literary Cinema
Formed by the Cinema
Female Agency and the Desire to Escape
The Post-Independence Legacy
Further Reading
Part VIII: Crossings and Crosscurrents
Chapter 26: The Fiction of the Irish in England
Absence and Alienation: Anglo-Irish Preoccupations
Refuge and Opportunity: Women’s Journeys
Assimilation and Ambivalence: Generational Dimensions
Further Reading
Chapter 27: Devolutionary States: Crosscurrents in Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction
Devolutionary Histories: Alasdair Gray, Patrick McCabe, and Robert McLiam Wilson
Devolutionary Engenderings: Anne Enright and A. L. Kennedy
Devolutionary Identities: Mike McCormack and Jenni Fagan
Further Reading
Chapter 28: Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel
Unhappily Ever After
Opening Bedroom and Closet Doors
Losing My Religion
Further Reading
Chapter 29: ‘A Sly, Mid-Atlantic Appropriation’: Ireland, the United States, and Transnational Fictions of Spain
Irish Transnational Fictions: Irish America and Beyond
Kate O’Brien, Maura Laverty, and ‘Unlooked-for Spain’
Coda
Further Reading
Part IX: Contemporary Irish Fiction
Chapter 30: Dublin in the Rare New Times
New Dublin(s)
Dublin’s Past(s)
Further Reading
Chapter 31: Northern Irish Fiction after the Troubles
Nihilism and Nostalgia
Gender Politics and the Ethics of Terrorism
Beyond the Troubles
Further Reading
Chapter 32: ‘Our Nameless Desires’: The Erotics of Time and Space in Contemporary Irish Lesbian and Gay Fiction
Coming Out
Historical Romances
Spaces of Desire
Further Reading
Chapter 33: Contemporary Irish-Language Fiction
The Major Strands of Contemporary Fiction in Irish
Gaeilge Noir
Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Experimental Irish-Language Fiction
Further Reading
Chapter 34: Post-Millennial Irish Fiction
Further Reading
Part X: Critical Evaluations
Chapter 35: The Irish Novelist as Critic and Anthologist
Fiction as Critique: The Autocritical Tradition
Strategic Realignments: Anthologizing Irish Fiction in the 1990s
Further Reading
Index
