Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities

by Paul Fagan (Editor), John Greaney (Editor), Tamara Radak (Editor)

Overview

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and jourbanalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburban Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications.
Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turban, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourbaning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350177369
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/21/2021
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Paul Fagan is a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University, Austria, President of the International Flann O'Brien Society, and a founding editor of The Jourbanal of Flann O'Brien Studies. Fagan is the co-editor of Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (Irish Studies in Europe), four books dedicated to Flann O'Brien and serves on the editorial board of the Production Archives special collection. He has published widely on modernism and Irish studies, and is completing a monograph on the Irish literary hoax.

John Greaney is a Fulbright-NUI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation. His work has been published in Textual Practice, Irish Studies Review and Derrida Today, amongst other venues.

Tamara Radak is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her publications include essays in James Joyce Quarterly, The Review of Irish Studies in Europe, Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority and European Joyce Studies. She is currently completing a monograph titled No Sense of an Ending? Modernist Aporias of Closure. She is a member of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History and has been an invited speaker at the Trieste Joyce School and the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Irish Modernisms in the Plural
Paul Fagan (Salzburg University, Austria), John Greaney (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Tamara Radak (University of Vienna, Austria)
Part 1
Contested Canons: Testing the Limits of Irish Modernism
1. Explaining Ourselves: Hannah Berman, Jewish Nationalism and Irish Modernism
John Brannigan (University College Dublin, Ireland)
2. A Forgotten Irish Modernist: Ethel Colburban Mayne
Elke D'hoker (KU Leuven, Belgium)
3. Melancholy Modernism: The Loss of the Irish Woman Poet 1930–1950
Lucy Collins (University College Dublin, Ireland)
4. Death and the Nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction
Maureen O'Connor (University College Cork, Ireland)
5. The Languages of Irish Modernism: Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel Beckett
Eoin Byrne (NUI Galway, Ireland)
Part 2
Corporeal Texts, Discursive Bodies: Biopolitical Irish Modernisms
6. Irish Skin: The Epidermiology of Modernism
Barry Sheils (Durham University, UK)
7. Irish Modernism and Revivalism: A Queer History?
Seán Hewitt (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
8. 'Survival of the Unfittest': Synge, Yeats and the Rhetoric of Health
Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston (University of Oxford, UK)
9. Rhetorics of Sacrifice: Sex, Gender and the Death Penalty in James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and the 1916 Generation
Katherine Ebury (Sheffield University, UK)
10. 'The ranks of respectability': Prostitution, Citizenship & the Free State in the Novels of Liam O'Flaherty
Laura Lovejoy (University College Cork, Ireland)
11. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Blind Bards in the Age of Silent Cinema
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (Bristol University, UK)
Part 3
Minor/Major Forms: Intermedial Irish Modernisms
12. Letters and Weak Theory in Irish Modernism
Maebh Long (University of Waikato, New Zealand)
13. The Machine in the (Holy) Ghost: Anti-Science Literature, Genre Fiction and Irish Modernism, 1890-1940
Jack Fennell (University of Limerick, Ireland)
14. Mechanical Animals, Flying Men and Educated Monkeys: Technology & Modernity in the Comic Strips of Jack B. Yeats
Michael Connerty (Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland)
15. 'the funeral of one's past': Thomas MacGreevy as Ireland's Modernist War Poet
Daniel Curran (Maynooth University, Ireland)
16. The Full Little Jug: Flann O'Brien and the Irish Public Sphere
Catherine Flynn (UC, Berkeley, USA)

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This varied and vibrant collection accomplishes two huge tasks: consolidating the field of New Irish modernisms and exploring hitherto unperceived objects (jourbanalism, letters, films, comic strips, lost poems, scientific writing, etc.) along with less visible actors. It is bracing to read Joyce with Hannah Berman, Beckett's bilingualism with O'Nolan's and Ó Cadhain's, or place W. B. Yeats next to Thomas MacGreevy and Ethel Colburban Mayne. Those alert chronicles redeem the fullness of past Irish cultural history: whatever was old or unmodern is here made “fresh and strange.”” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, USA

“Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities is a welcome contribution to the field of Irish modernism, impressive in its conception and remarkably fresh and timely despite engaging a field and a set of concepts that have been up for scholarly debate for quite some time… the joy of the chapters is their ability to approach (and invite a study of) Irish modernism from a bottom-up historical perspective, while interrogating the cultural capital that has accrued to the critical label. This is a powerful and original way of thinking through the paradox of a scholarly field that occupies the very centre of any Global Modernist canon yet remains profoundly (even proudly) local in its historical, political and linguistic self-identifications.” —Ruben Borg, Associate Professor in English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

From the Publisher