Trends in the Contemporary Irish Novel: Sex, Lies, and Gender

Abstract

The 1990s Irish novel presents its own brand of uniqueness and sophistication to the contemporary Anglophone novel. In this article I divide the development of the 1990s Irish novel into three groups. The first type of novel that emerges in the 1990s concerns the presentation of a different image of Ireland, one that magnifies gender construction and sexual preference. The second group of novels concerns the act of reading itself and the difficulty in determining truth from lies. These novels impair the reader's ability to read in an effort to show that everything is a form of interpretation: memories, history, actions, evidence, facts. The third group of 1990s novels produced in the last decade of the twentieth century deterritorializes our traditional sense-making capabilities; each text utilizes different prose strategies which deterritorialize traditional sense through movement both mimetically and stylistically.