Irish Fiction Research Articles

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. This paper evaluates the capacity of the contemporary Northern Irish novel to act as an agent of transmission for a ‘post-Troubles’ readership, one distanced by a generation from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that symbolised the partial end of sectarian violence. The critic Liam Harte suggests that “no part of modern Europe (if not the world) has greater claim than Northern Ireland to the mantle of most-narrativized region”, but the transmissive function of fictional works in this context remain under-critiqued. Here, I assess the aspirations of novelistic narrative to cater for what Premesh Lalu has described, in the context of post-apartheid South African art forms, as ‘psychic repair’ (Undoing Apartheid, 2023). The essay engages the 2018 novel Milkman, by Northern Irish author Anna Burns, to ask how fictional narrative transmits the detail of the past across a generation first, in parallel to other literary and artistic genres, and second, in relation to an expanding archive of ongoing legal tribunals and government incentives directed towards the production of an ‘official history’ for Northern Ireland. Through attention to the self-conscious foregrounding of forensic reading practice by Burns and fellow writers, I show the necessary place of fictional recovery in the field of political and cultural memory. Keywords: Troubles, Northern Irish fiction, transmission, memory, generation

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

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.

Defiance of “Magdalenes”. Female Challenges in Recent Irish Fiction by Nicoleta Stanca

Defiance of “Magdalenes”. Female Challenges in Recent Irish Fiction by Nicoleta Stanca

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.

Review of Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, by Mary M. McGlynn

Review of Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, by Mary M. McGlynn (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022) 320 pp., ISBN 9780815637776, $80.00 (hardback)

#MeToo and the Northern Ireland Troubles: Anna Burns' Milkman

This article examines the relationship between Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) and the gender politics of the #MeToo movement. It argues that reading Milkman in light of #MeToo helps us understand the book’s depiction of sexual violence and illuminates an important, hidden history of the Northern Irish conflict. Drawing on a range of feminist scholars, it situates Milkman within a series of broader debates about the ‘cultural scaffolding’ of sexual violence and the historically masculinist logic of Irish nationalism. The article concludes by situating Milkman within a predominant thematic strain in recent Irish fiction; namely, the ‘retrospective mood’ whereby authors have sought to revisit the past and re-examine its legacies for the precarious peace of the present.

Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

Eóin Flannery, <i>Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction</i>

Vulnerability in Post-Millennial Irish Fiction: The Case of Donal Ryan

ABSTRACT This article analyses Donal Ryan’s representation of individual and community vulnerability in his three novels, The Spinning Heart (2012), The Thing About December (2013) and From a Low and Quiet Sea (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks on vulnerability developed by Ganteau, Sabsay, Butler, and especially Kirby’s take on vulnerability as stemming from political economy, this article examines Ryan’s special articulation of vulnerability in post-millennial Irish fiction. The analysis concludes that Ryan develops a taxonomy of vulnerability in his fiction that addresses a series of contexts and risk factors. Ryan represents the exposure of individuals and the community to social vulnerability in Ireland within the discourses of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath. Ryan’s fiction depicts dimensions of vulnerability affecting society at large and illustrates the overall failure to spread the success of the neoliberal Celtic Tiger equally.

Edgeworth’s “Great Coat”: A Material-Semiotic Reading of the Irish Mantle and Novelistic Interiority

This article presents a material-semiotic reading of the Irish mantle to develop a new, formal analysis of subjective interiority in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish novels. The mantle’s material functions of concealment and physical defense in medieval Ireland, alongside its imperial and nationalist adaptations in the writings of Edmund Spenser and Joseph Cooper Walker, evince the garment’s complex narrativity. Informed by new materialist theory, this article uses the mantle’s material and semiotic articulations, from its violent history and gendered adaptations in the early nineteenth century, to adapt Deidre Lynch’s model of deep character in the British novel to Irish fiction. Through the allusion to colonial violence, the mantles in Castle Rackrent (1800) and Ennui (1809) structure a deep interiority that is unique to Irish character. The mantle both signals and conceals the depths of Irish subjectivity within the text, confounding reader-character intimacy. Edgeworth’s mantles demand a revised model of deep character for the Irish context.

The Economy of Murder: Capital, Crime, and Crisis in Peter Murphy’s and Rachael Moriarty’s Traders (2015)

The abundance of contemporary Irish fiction dealing with crime seems hard to refute. While most works have been produced in the literary field, cinema has also explored Ireland’s contemporary situation through the lens of crime fiction. The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between crime, crisis, and capital in a contemporary Irish thriller: Peter Murphy and Rachael Moriarty’s Traders (2015). The film creates a bleak and acidic depiction of Ireland’s financial world and how in times of crisis, crime and capital are negotiated and articulated. A brief introduction of what the Celtic Tiger era and its subsequent crisis meant for Ireland will be followed by an exploration of its relation to the crime thriller. By studying crime and its intersections with class structures, economic conditions, and the shaping of its space in the film, I will attempt to undertake an economic and aesthetic reading. Moreover, I will consider how the film delineates a portrait of Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger society and all its consequences.

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery

Reviewed by: Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery Kevin Hargaden (bio) Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), ix + 239 pages Ireland almost went bankrupt in 2008. The aftermath was marked by devastating unemployment, a return to mass emigration, and the establishment of policy commitments directly responsible for the present housing crisis, along with innumerable cuts in funding and limitations on social initiatives as part of the crushing austerity regime. It is surprising how quickly the death of the Celtic Tiger has been assumed into Irish discourse as an event we all acknowledge but do not particularly need to reference. The economists who boosted the bubble are back on our screens and in our broadsheets as commentators. The ten-year anniversary passed without much more than a few newspaper features1 and we have slipped happily back into economic buoyancy, marked by inflated property prices and semi-regular chastisements about the importance of keeping wages low to maintain the market’s confidence in our productivity. It is hard not to think that this period in our recent history warrants more attention. And in Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction, Eóin Flannery, from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, offers a crucial intervention. It might seem that an assessment of this period from an English literature department would be marginal. Surely it is the economists and sociologists who must take the lead on understanding the significance of these events? But Irish novelists were examining the economic and social changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger through the boom days and into the period of barren bust. Flannery considers Chris Binchy’s Open-Handed (2008), Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010), Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015), Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December (2015) and The Spinning Heart (2012), his debut novel that preceded The Thing About December in terms of publication but exists in a subsequent text within the novels’ narrative chronology. He also considers Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013), Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), as well as discussing the poem The Celtic Tiger (1999) by the late Denis O’Driscoll. Throughout these discussions, Flannery is concerned with ‘how authors of Irish literary fiction grapple with the registration of debt and indebtedness in the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath’ (p. 9). This is a fascinating way into [End Page 127] an essential conversation – the abstract concepts of neoliberal capitalism can be illuminated in a fresh light when set inside the plot of a novel. There is a logical progression through the different books discussed. We start with Binchy and Cunningham’s novels which present ‘not a clinical analysis of a crudely divisive economic system but a second-hand description of well-known commoditized types’ (p. 38, emphasis original). These may be entertaining novels, but they are structured so as to engage with the Celtic Tiger in a way that re-inscribes the consensus narratives which are grouped under the ‘we all partied’ and ‘a few bad apples’ clichés. We end with The Mark and the Void, a complex novel which confronts the reader directly with what we think a novel is and what it can do. The relationship established between the main characters – a novelist named Paul suffering writer’s block and a depressed financier named Claude – allows Murray to draw attention ‘to the fictive nature of the macrostructure of high finance’ (p. 181). This is a work of literary criticism before it is a work of social analysis and Flannery’s insights offer readers a renewed appreciation of the works under discussion. Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood is the focus for the second chapter and Flannery unveils the role shame plays in the narrative, proposing that while not perfect, the novel offers ‘a prompt with which to commence renewed discussions regarding the possibilities of shame in the Irish context’ (p. 73). Flannery shows us how Donal Ryan’s novels formally...

Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction, by José Carregal (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2021)

Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction, by José Carregal (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2021)

Review of Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis, by Eóin Flannery

Review of Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis, by Eóin Flannery (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 239 pp., ISBN: 9781350166745, £ 85.00 (hardback)

Absurdist Fiction in the Focus of Philosophy: Máirtín Ó Cadhain and his Novel "The Dirty Dust"

The subject of the study is the phenomenon of the absurd in Irish fiction and its relation to philosophical discourse. Absurdist fiction is proposed to be analyzed from the point of view of the philosophical meanings embedded in it. Most often, this is the interpretation of the absurd as a concept meaning a person's discord with the world. The novel by the Irish writer &amp;#211; Cadhain is considered as representing the absurdity of the human existence. In the analysis of the novel, the methods of modern cultural knowledge were used: the description of various sociocultural trends and phenomena, their theoretical generalization. The purpose of the work is to clarify the meaning of the absurd for the constitution of human existence. The article explores the connection of the realities present in the novel with the philosophy of traditionalism. The absurd is investigated as an indicator of the "silencing" of meaning. The factors that bring together the views of modernists who wrote about the absurd and the traditionalist doctrine are: fixation of the destruction of the habitual way of life, self-integrity, perversion or disappearance of the hierarchical social order, substitution of values, a direct indication of the "end of time" (eschatology). Changes in speech almost always act as an indicator of the heroes losing their own identity. With the help of this indicator, as a rule, loss of connection with Another, global alienation and dehumanization of a human being are recorded. Thus, the importance of the category of the absurd for fundamental philosophical ontology is proved.

Bram Stoker’s dialects: nation, race, and speech in the early Irish fictions

ABSTRACT In his early Irish novels, Bram Stoker uses Irish speech and Standard English to wrestle with Ireland’s precarious status in the United Kingdom. In The Primrose Path, Stoker distinguishes the speech of the Irish characters from the narrator’s Standard English, ultimately associating Standard English with the corrupting forces in London that doom the story’s protagonist. Contrarily, in The Snake’s Pass, Stoker ultimately imagines a joint Anglo-Irish Protestant rule that is enthusiastically accepted by the Irish Catholic residents, with Standard English literally overwriting local language. The curious and obscure tale “The Man from Shorrox’” offers a later, destabilised representation of England and Ireland, one in which the story’s Gothic doubling breaks down even the conventional attachment between spoken dialect and regional origin altogether.

The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660–1790 by Joe Lines

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Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction by José Carregal

Carregal, José. Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2021. pp. 218.

Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves

Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves

VIOLENCE AND BIGOTRY: REGRESSIVE INNOVATION IN KEVIN BARRY’S CITY OF BOHANE

Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane is one of the most celebrated recent works of Irish fiction. It is set in 2053, and tells the story of a people living in an environment of constant conflict where senseless acts of violence and bigotry are prevalent. This surprisingly negative imagining of Ireland in the future cannot be ignored considering the modern history of the country. The contemporary history of Ireland is fraught with a long and desperate struggle against the English Empire and its colonial forces as they tried for centuries to take over their neighboring island and completely colonize Ireland and its people. The English used two main weapons to further their goals in this matter: brutal military force and cultural sabotage. The cultural sabotage that the English brought to Ireland was mainly done by replacing Gaelic with English as the language of the Irish, and portraying them as culturally inferior and uncivilized in comparison to their English neighbors. Irish literature of the past few centuries has struggled to come to terms with this history of violence and dehumanization perpetuated by the English. Surprisingly, Kevin Barry in his novel callously repeats and escalates most of these negative stereotypes that have plagued Irish literature for years. The following study takes a closer look at the history of colonial violence and negative Irish stereotypes, and argues that City of Bohane is regressive in its depiction of Ireland as culturally ignorant and violent. That is to say, while the story is set four decades into the future, the author inexplicably insists on moving back in time to unearth and repurpose major colonial stereotypes that portray the Irish as uncivilized and backwards, to the great detriment of his innovative style and creative use of language in this novel.