The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford Handbooks)

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five distinguished scholars of Irish fiction. Collectively, they provide accessible and incisive assessments of the breadth and achievement of Ireland’s modern novelists and short story writers, whose contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to the country’s small size. The volume brings an impressive 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 nature and function of the Irish Gothic mode; 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. 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 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. 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.0The 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 Mairtin O Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, 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 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 Mairtin O Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, 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