The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

by Harte, Liam

• ISBN13: 9780198889892
• ISBN10: 0198889895
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780191071058
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-09-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

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 Biography

Liam Harte, Professor of Irish Literature, University of Manchester

Liam Harte is Professor of Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. His publications include A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Macmillan, 2000; co-edited with Michael Parker).

Table of Contents

Part I: Introduction
1. Modern Irish Fiction: Renewing the Art of the New, Liam Harte
Part II: Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Legacies
2. Irish Gothic Fiction, Jarlath Killeen
3. Nation, Gender, and Genre: Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Development of Irish Fiction, Gerardine Meaney
4. Shame is the Spur: Novels by Irish Catholics, 1873-1922, James H. Murphy
Part III: Irish Revivalism and Irish Modernism
5. George Moore: Gender, Place, and Narrative, Elizabeth Grubgeld
6. Revival Fiction: Proclaiming the Future, Gregory Castle
7. The Materialist Fabulist Dialectic: James Stephens, Eimar O'Duffy, and Magic Naturalism, Gregory Dobbins
8. Epic Modernism: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Sam Slote
9. The Parallax of Irish-Language Modernism, 1900-1940, Brian Ó Conchubhair
Part IV: After the Revival, In Joyce's Wake
10. Lethal in Two Languages: Narrative Form and Cultural Politics in the Fiction of Flann O'Brien and Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Louis de Paor
11. Effing the Ineffable: Samuel Beckett's Narrators,, Sinéad Mooney
12. Obliquities: Elizabeth Bowen and the Modern Short Story, Allan Hepburn
13. The Role and Representation of Betrayal in the Irish Short Story Since Dubliners, Gerry Smyth
14. Arrows in Flight: Success and Failure in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction, Heather Ingman
15. 'Proud of Our Wee Ulster'?: Writing Region and Identity in Ulster Fiction, Norman Vance
Part V: Fiction in the Modernizing Republic and the Troubled North
16. Edna O'Brien and the Politics of Belatedness, Jane Elizabeth Dougherty
17. 'Half-Arsed Modern': John McGahern and the Failed State, Frank Shovlin
18. John Banville's Fictions of Art, Neil Murphy
19. Intimacy, Sex, and Violence in Northern Irish Women's Fiction, Caroline Magennis
Part VI: Irish Genre Fiction
20. Irish Crime Fiction, Ian Campbell Ross
21. Irish Science Fiction, Jack Fennell
22. House, Land, and Family Life: Children's Fiction and Irish Homes, Pádraic Whyte
Part VII: Fact into Fiction, Fiction into Film
23. The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901-2015, Melissa Fegan
24. Fictions of 1916 in the Story of Ireland, Laura O'Connor
25. Irish Literary Cinema, Kevin Rockett
Part VIII: Crossings and Crosscurrents
26. The Fiction of the Irish in England, Tony Murray
27. Devolutionary States: Crosscurrents in Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction, Stefanie Lehner
28. Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel, Sally Barr Ebest
29. 'A Sly, Mid-Atlantic Appropriation': Ireland, the United States, and Transnational Fictions of Spain, Sinéad Moynihan
Part IX: Contemporary Irish Fiction
30. Dublin in the Rare New Times, Derek Hand
31. Northern Irish Fiction After the Troubles, Fiona McCann
32. 'Our Nameless Desires': The Erotics of Time and Space in Contemporary Irish Lesbian and Gay Fiction, Michael G. Cronin
33. Contemporary Irish-Language Fiction, Pádraig Ó Siadhail
34. Post-Millennial Irish Fiction, Susan Cahill
Part X: Critical Evaluations
35. The Irish Novelist as Critic and Anthologist, Eve Patten