Contemporary Irish Research Articles

“One soft kiss” in a derelict world

Abstract The paper focuses on the contemporary Irish poet Alan Gillis’s latest collection, The Readiness, with special attention paid to “Metropolis” and “Vespers,” two long poems that come in the latter part of the volume. In them, the pressures of late modernity, which are thematised throughout The Readiness, are given sustained attention, revealing loneliness and dereliction as the most excruciating aspects of an individual’s life. While the bleak perspective on late modern existence is characteristic of Gillis work to date, I show that the poems included in this collection, each in its own distinct way, discover relief from the alienation in the establishment of meaningful relationships with other people.

Spicebags, slippery masks and ‘Free Staters’: anti-republican anti-populism in contemporary Irish political discourse

ABSTRACT This article critically interrogates how in contemporary Irish political discourse anti-populism, specifically anti-left populism, is articulated as a form of anti-republicanism. This is large part due to the histories of anti-colonial republicanism in Ireland and the popular republican grammar they have bequeathed to contemporary political discourse. This thematic of (anti)populist politics is of renewed interest and urgency given the recent surge in popularity of Sinn Féin, a broadly left-wing republican populist party. This article adopts a discourse analytical method and identifies several key tropes of anti-republican anti-populism that centre largely around the framing of Sinn Féin as a non-normative or not-normal political party, given its historical connection to paramilitarism. Other key themes of anti-republican anti-populism include the politics of housing, policing and the nature of democratic representation. What emerges is a picture of Irish republicanism as a spectral remainder of past political struggles against colonial order and political exclusion. As such, republican politics bring into view the contingency of established order and reveals the fragile nature of political legitimacy in post-partition Ireland. This article concludes by commenting on what the Irish postcolony reveals about the nature of anti-populisms in Europe and its peripheries.

A Review of Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak

Published in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan, Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak proposes to explore the topic of silence by analysing how it is embedded in language, culture, society and institutions and providing a forum for the discussion of the uses (and abuses) of silence in the context of Irish fiction. The essays cover a span of different well-known authors in the Irish literary sphere such as Donal Ryan, Emma Donoghue, Colm Tóibín, Evelyn Conlon, Kevin Barry, Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Claire Keegan, Maeve Kelly, Eibhear Walshe, Emer Martin and Sally Rooney

Adaptation as Means of Revising Gender Relations in Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country

The aim of the present paper is to investigate Brian Friel’s A Month in the Country, in which the Irish writer refocuses attention to enhance the psychological nature of the drama and to allow space to the female voice that is given less emphasis in the original. To reveal the differences between Turgenev’s play and the adapted version of it, I will try to answer the question of to what extent the changes introduced by Friel contribute to the debates on gender relations in contemporary Irish society.

Sport, migration and national identity in contemporary Irish media

ABSTRACT Taking a “cultural studies” approach that focuses on the ways in which media negotiate the intersections of nation, race and ethnicity, this article examines Irish print and broadcast media discourses of migration surrounding the Irish national soccer team and Gaelic games following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It argues that the focus on the Irish soccer team’s “home-grown” diversity has superficially celebrated a developing national cosmopolitanism and embrace of migration, but against the backdrop of declining national team fortunes and recruits from the emigrant descendant “diaspora” in Britain. Profiles of immigrant players in Gaelic games have engaged critically, to a degree, with nativism and racism, but offer a benign and future-orientated representation of these games. While significant, both are limited as vehicles for collective national retrospection and introspection with regard to racism in Irish sport and society.

Negotiating Genre, Style, and Contemporality in an Intergenerational Irish Music Ensemble

This article examines community negotiations of genre and style through the lens of intergenerational collaboration in a contemporary Irish music ensemble at Florida State University. In this ensemble, community members participated alongside university students in the ensemble through a state-funded senior education program. Throughout this process, students and community members navigated differences between local scene-established formats of musical material and new student-directed arrangements. Community members articulated desires to ‘keep the scene going’ and establish community longevity while negotiating this “shifting topography” (Shuker 2001: 6) of popular-traditional genre practice. The practices of this ensemble, explored through an autoethnographic lens with interview contributions from student and community members, build on existing studies on intergenerational ensemble practices (Harrington 2021, Conway and Hodgman 2008, Jang 2020), genre negotiation (Holt 2007), and aging identity (Bennet and Hodkinson 2012). This suggests important implications for intergenerational music-making and building music communities with deep generational and musical diversity.

Re-thinking Eating Disorders as Cultural Pathologies in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Case Study

Eating disorders—a generic term that includes anorexia nervosa, bulimia, binge eating and many other subtypes of problematic relationships with food and eating—are situated at the interface of disciplines as varied as medicine, biology, history, cultural studies, gender studies and the social sciences. Although the reasons behind the development and experience of an eating disorder are individual as well as cultural, these pathologies tend to be analysed from either an exclusively biomedical perspective—which often excludes the cultural factor—or oversimplified as being the result of the stereotypes of beauty imposed on the female body in western cultural traditions. This essay, in contrast, looks at eating disorders as multi-layered metaphors of cultural dissidence within the social order and literary traditions of contemporary Ireland. It is divided into distinct, though interrelated, sections: a brief introduction to eating disorders; a consideration of the problems posed in the representation of emaciated corporealities; a taxonomical classification of the primary sources found in the course of my research; and the analysis of Mary O’Donnell’s poem “Reading the Sunflowers in September” as a case study to illustrate the literal and metaphorical employment of anorexia in contemporary Irish poetry. Although the análisis is philological, the perspective adopted is that of the Medical Humanities, in that I will make use of literary, cultural and biomedical literature in order to provide a view that is complementary to the scientific discourse around anorexia nervosa. O’Donnell’s poem will be considered in relation to European visual arts, particularly photography, in order to enhance the transnational dimension of eating disorders. At the same time, the close reading of the poem under analysis will be complemented by a comparative analysis with other Irish poems of the late 20th and early 21st centuries to underline the relevance of the national context in interpreting the representation of this disease. Ultimately, this essay aims to proffer new perspectives on the pathology and to contribute to the social understanding of those who experience it.

Community With Shared Differences: Solo Performance in Pat Kinevane’s Silent and Panti’s A Woman in Progress

Solo performance is a theatrical form which has been increasingly popular in contemporary Irish theatre with the rise of individualism. This paper takes the works of two representative solo performers in contemporary Irish theatre, Pat Kinevane and Panti (Rory O’Neill) as examples, trying to discuss how the form of solo performance is applied by the two performers to create an intermediate space for the marginalized groups to find their distinctive voices and for the audience to identify with the “other”, so as to build up a community that respects differences. While at the same time, the two performers use postdramatic strategies to admonish the audience to take a step back to reexamine the constructiveness of community and performativity of identity. By addressing the significance of solo performance in contemporary Irish theatre, this paper calls for the diversification of not only subjects but also forms in contemporary Irish theatre.

The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation by John Greaney (London: Bloomsbury 2022)

John Greaney's The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation explores a point of tension in Irish Studies between modernist aesthetics and postcolonial historiography. Challenging the theoretical paradigms prevalent in contemporary Irish Studies, the book invites us to interrogate the meta-historical and political narratives that inform our reading of literary works by Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and Kate O’Brien.

Conscious Irish Fiction and the Repetitiveness of War: Transcultural Memories to Negotiate Peace in “Redemption Falls” and “TransAtlantic”

Drawing on recent scholarship on transcultural memory and its role in peacebuilding, this paper explores the implications of entangling memories that belong to different pasts, places, and cultural groups in Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls (2007) and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). Both novels, written by authors interested in the notions of oppression and suppression of stories, are polyphonic texts that disrupt any single linear narrative by interweaving multiple storylines through constant movements across time and space. McCann’s focus shifts from the aftermath of WWI to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, while O’Connor’s novel deals with the American Civil War and Irish nationalism; both recount episodes of the Great Famine, the ensuing emigration, and the history of Abolitionism. Hence, painful memories of the Irish mingle with the mnemonic repertoires of those who suffered the abominations of slavery or internecine conflict in an attempt to give voice to the marginalised and highlight bonds between (apparently unrelated) groups of people. Moreover, this convergence of inherited memories binds the past with the present and the future, as the recollections have echoes of contemporary conflicts and global phenomena involving Ireland, whose role in them is implicitly interrogated. By fusing significant cultural memories across generations and spaces, these novels assert the ‘historical duty’ to remember to promote negotiation and mutual understanding between different cultural groups today. This paper, therefore, will first offer an overview of contemporary Irish fiction, characterised by an original world-facing, rather than nation-focused, outlook. Second, it will undertake the analysis of the selected novels to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the potential of literature to build sound knowledge of diverse human experiences and, as a consequence, promote peace.

Jean Lee Cole. 2020. How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895–1920. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 214 pp., 63 illustr., $ 112.00.

Abstract Adrian Duncan’s second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) marks a departure from ‘typical’ Irish topics such as national identity and religion. This he shares with a range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel’s focus on architecture and engineering, which also looms large in Duncan’s other novels Love Notes from a German Building Site and The Geometer Lobachevsky, is unique, as it leads to unusual reflections on the nature of material culture. This original approach to the novel form should be considered as part of the current international trend to integrate theoretical reflections on a wide range of topics, thus negotiating contemporary cultures of knowledge. The novel’s international outlook moves away from ‘typical’ Irish topics of national identity and religion shared by a wider range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel is thus also a reflection on the collapse of old systems, be they political, social, or epistemological, and the existential uncertainty created by their demise. I argue in my paper that Duncan’s novel addresses questions of knowledge formation that bear a striking resemblance to the Romantic novel as an open and generically hybrid form. I read it in a wider context as part of an ongoing experience of crisis: my overall thesis aims at describing the contemporary tendency to include abstract reflections that interrupt the narrative sequence as an expression of a fundamental crisis of knowledge. Today’s mediascape represents the contemporary world in a state of severe emergency, whose symptoms, be they climate change, the rise of nationalism and the far right, ultimately lead to a fundamental experience of contingency. Novels like Duncan’s can thus be seen as an expression of the crisis of the contemporary media ecology of knowledge.

Marina Carr'ın Kediler Bataklığı'nda ve Kanlı Düğün Adlı Oyunlarda Küyerelleşme ve Uyarlama

Embarking on her career by imitating the Beckettian style at the end of the 1980s, Marina Carr (1964- ), a contemporary Irish female playwright, later moves to a phase in which she rewrites ancient myths, Greek tragedies and some other classical works, including those of William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf. While Carr brings the female voice and agency into sharper focus in her adaptations, her revisions integrate the global myth or story with local Irish elements. What emerges here is that Carr puts the global in conversation with the local considering that her source text stands for the universal, and her elaboration on Irish culture and troubles resonates with the particular. It is noted that, following the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the time Carr initiates her dramatic career, Irish drama has undergone a radical change with globalisation. However, it is the particular argument of this paper that Marina Carr’s way of rewriting corresponds with glocalisation, a term which suggests the incorporation of the local into the global. From the early stage of her writing to her recent works, Carr’s use of glocalisation in her adaptations can be pinpointed. This article explores the elements of glocalisation in Carr’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea in By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in Blood Wedding (2019) as examples from two different periods of her oeuvre. Hence, this paper considers the Irish playwright’s method of adaptation in terms of glocalisation.

The rise of the phoenix: restoration and renaissance in contemporary Irish writing

The rise of the phoenix: restoration and renaissance in contemporary Irish writing

“Do not destroy me before my time”: Iphigenia’s Versions and Appropriations in Contemporary Irish Theatre

Iphigenia in Aulis has been adapted by Irish contemporary playwrights such as Marina Carr, Edna O’Brien or Andy Hinds. This article offers an introductory analysis of the reasons behind the Irish interest towards the Greek tragedy, followed by a comparative study of the three versions mentioned. The identification of the overarching themes will unveil the spaces for transformation: while Carr focuses on the depiction of a modern and corrupt Agamemnon and the rewriting of strong women, O’Brien adds extra plots and characters to highlight feminist voices, and Hinds eliminates, adds and relocates lines from the original play, to write a more performable version. Conclusions reveal the rewriting of the concept of sacrificial women, and present the three plays as relevant contributions to the reception of Euripides in Ireland.

The Celtic Phoenix, capitalist realism, and contemporary Irish women’s novels

The Celtic Phoenix, capitalist realism, and contemporary Irish women’s novels

“The sick body has its own narrative impulse”: contemporary Irish illness narratives and institutions of care

“The sick body has its own narrative impulse”: contemporary Irish illness narratives and institutions of care

To Ireland in the end times: figuring the future in contemporary Irish fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines a new strand of speculative Irish fiction that has emerged in the post-Celtic Tiger era. Focusing on novels by Kevin Barry, Sarah Davis-Goff, Catherine Prasifka and Danny Denton, I analyse how the speculative mode, with its ontological obliquities and temporal distortions, is particularly commensurate to the environmental and socio-economic complexities and predicaments facing Ireland at present. Specifically, these novels centre on problems and crises that have national and regional manifestations, but are ultimately global in scale and extent: ecological degradation, sea-level rise, food scarcity, pandemics, and the social and psychic effects of neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism. In coming to terms with such issues, particularly the hyperobject of climate change, these novels are often at their most effective in moments that de-privilege anthropocentric perspectives by establishing existential intimacies and political affinities with the natural and non-human realms.

Dis-orienting Orientalism in contemporary Irish writing: Yan Ge’s Irish short stories

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of Asia and Asian characters in contemporary Irish writing, drawing on the discourse on Orientalism and other postcolonial theories. Orientalism in Irish studies has undergone multiple phases: from the Celtic-Oriental ties that stressed cross-colonial identification with Eastern countries as a way to bolster nationalist narratives during the Celtic Revival, to the comparison with new and futuristic, late capitalist East Asian “Tiger” societies from the 1990s to the present day. Irish Orientalism thus stands uneasily between traditional Anglo-European Orientalism, which continues to reproduce certain stereotypes of the Other, and anti-imperial agendas that challenge established colonial discourses. While differing from its British counterpart, Irish literature has often been complicit in producing and sustaining Orientalist images, especially in its representations of migrants. By analysing Yan Ge’s short stories set in Ireland, this article offers a rare perspective from the Other side. Yan Ge’s thematic and formal consideration of her status as an Asian outsider aims to dis-orient and re-orient Irish readers. By looking steadily back at the Orientalist gaze, the portrayals of cross-cultural encounters in Yan Ge’s works help to create more fruitful and equitable conversations regarding Ireland’s role in the global order and its changing relationship with Asia.

“On the edge of foreign”: race and (non-)belonging in contemporary Irish crime fiction

ABSTRACT Using Andrew Nugent’s Second Burial (2007) to exemplify the Celtic Tiger era crime fiction, this article compares Second Burial to two recent Celtic Phoenix era crime novels: Tana French’s The Trespasser (2016) and Brian O’Connor’s Bloodline (2017). In doing so, I show how Irish crime authors forge a complicated path from the isolated token immigrant figure to a more nuanced portrayal of belonging and non-belonging. I argue that, in case of recent Irish crime fiction, spaces of belonging are established and defined through visible but also through audible markers of difference. My essay demonstrates the stubborn persistence of a residual desire for delineating the aural and visual boundaries that separate the national “I” from strangers, citizens from non-belonging aliens.

Grad2Work: Using Design Thinking to Create a Postgraduate Learning Programme in a Contemporary Irish Context

Grad2Work: Using Design Thinking to Create a Postgraduate Learning Programme in a Contemporary Irish Context