Staging the Community in Irish Short Fiction: Choruses, Cycles and Crimes

Abstract

This chapter sets out to investigate how community has been represented in the short stories by Irish women writers. Although O’Connor and many other critics have argued that community has no place in the short story at all, several Irish writers do stage a concern with community in their stories and represent communal structures in various ways. First, the chapter looks at the different ways in which community is staged in the stories of Egerton and Lavin: as an abstract idea(l), a silent constraint or a polyphonic chorus. The chapter then discusses Irish writers’ use of the literary form of the short story cycle as a means of dramatizing community life. Theories of the short story cycle—and its subgenre, the narrative of community—form the conceptual background for a discussion of Jane Barlow’s Irish Idylls (1893) and Strangers at Lisconnel (1895), Mary Beckett’s A Belfast Woman (1980) and A Literary Woman (1990), and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s The Shelter of Neighbours (2012). In each case, a close reading of the collections seeks to show how the thematic concern with human networks is supported through the specific formal characteristics of the short story cycle (e.g. its tension between cohering and separating forces). The analysis of these authors’ specific take on community is also informed by the philosophical inquiries of Jean-Luc Nancy.