Abstract
This article considers representations of melancholia in post-Celtic Tiger Irish literature. By situating their post-recession fictions in “ghost estates,” or largely uninhabited housing developments, Donal Ryan and Tana French present neoliberally-inflected varieties of melancholia for their contemporary readers to contemplate. The settings of the ghost estates – and the accompanying supernatural elements to the texts – call to mind ghosts of Ireland’s past and legacies of recent economically unsound policies, spurring the reader to think about the imagined loss of futurity that accompanied the Irish economic crash. “Ghost stories for ghost estates,” then, represent an important contribution to the growing field of post-recession Irish literature.
Highlights
Euro DisasterLand Part II: Greece (Michael Lewis, November 2010) An excerpt from The Big Short (Michael Lewis, April 2010)
When I flew to Dublin in early November, the Irish government was busy helping the Irish people come to terms with their loss
A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros
Summary
Euro DisasterLand Part II: Greece (Michael Lewis, November 2010) An excerpt from The Big Short (Michael Lewis, April 2010). A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros.
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