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Anne Enright has been hailed as one of the most exciting contemporary Irish writers, praised for her lyrical, evocative language and her original style. According to Colm Toibin, Enright 'has taken up and refined the legacy of Sterne and Flann O'Brien which, for the first time in its long life in fiction, has become post-Freudian, post-feminist and post-nationalist'. Postnationalism could consequently also be seen as an always present counter-current to the mythologising tendencies of nationalism, which would make Anne Enright part of a long-standing tradition rather than the representative of something new. Reading the novel What Are You Like? as a postnationalist text is of course to accept the centrality of 'nation' in Irish literature. As far as criticism is concerned it would seem that every Irish novel is about nation or at least that every Irish novel should be read in a national context.
This chapter examines the representation of the house by two contemporary women poets, arguing that the relationship between the speaking subject and the space of dwelling and of writing is a complex and contingent one. By examining poems from collections byEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke published since the early 1990s, the differing responses that the established poet and the younger writer have to concepts of house and home can be developed. Both Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke explore important dimensions of their observing and writing selves by means of the fascinating matrix of images. Though Ní Chuilleanáin. uses personal material obliquely in her poetry, links between private and public concerns afford her opportunities to explore important cultural issues through the shaping of individual perspectives. For a poet orientated towards home and family it is inevitable that Vona Groarke should explore the home as a specifically creative space.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the drama, poetry and autobiography fiction published since 1990, but also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The period from 1990 to 2007, has witnessed significant developments within Irish culture and society, which have shaped and transformed the writing and reading of identity, sexuality, history and gender. Not least among the factors which fostered a new, positive mood on the island was the considerable progress made during the 1990s in resolving the crisis in Northern Ireland. Multinational corporations and investors from Europe and the USA found the Republic highly attractive because of its exceptionally low corporation tax, its stability in industrial relations, and its highly skilled, well-educated, English-speaking workforce.
The soft furnishings showcase Irish writing in its broad sense: literary and political writing, and both official languages in Ireland. The universalising model of development would situate Ireland as a marginal culture in the context of wider European and Atlantic modernity. The conventional oppositions of east-west and north-south that have shaped modern Irish culture must also now be re-thought in global terms. Literary criticism has remained a central disciplinary component of Irish Studies, and Irish criticism could not remain immune to the theory wars that convulsed literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s. By the start of the 1990s Irish literature, and Irish Studies more widely, was encountering theory in a sustained fashion. The introduction of postcolonial theory, alongside the controversy involving the inclusiveness of the Anthology, has proved a particularly vexed issue in analyses of the Field Day enterprise.
A more acclaimed feature of Irish drama and one of its most marketable features is the lyric-narrative. One of the greatest challenges in Irish drama from 1990 to 2006 has been how to produce theatre that can deal with or respond to contemporary conditions. The fallout of the triumphalist materialism of the 1990s, coupled with loosening bonds between nation and identity, continue to present a challenge for the new playwrights of the 1990s. Playfully renovating performance conventions, Improbable Frequency also humorously unravels the conventions of the history play, so beloved of Irish playwrights. Martine Pelletier's contribution addresses the phenomenon of immigration and some of the attempts by Irish playwrights and practitioners to stage it. Pelletier's portrayal of Ireland through a reading of several plays as a place which is 'reluctantly coming to terms with its multicultural character' concludes with a discussion of Brian Friel's play, The Home Place.
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
A new generation of talented poets is beginning to re-shape the face of Irish and Northern Irish literature can be found in Selima Guinness's The New Irish Poets and John Brown's Magnetic North: The Emerging Poets. This chapter focuses on the debut collections of two writers, Sinead Morrissey and Nick Laird, whose work exemplifies many of the attributes identified by Guinness and Brown. With three volumes to her credit, Morrissey has perhaps the most substantial profile to date among the new generation of poets. In contrast to Morrissey, whose book contains only one passing reference to her father, Laird's To a Fault begins with a series of glimpses of his father, a figure who comes across as simultaneously present and remote. The chapter suggests that many traits identified by Brown and Guinness are equally demonstrable in the writing of their literary forebears, the Heaney-Mahon-Longley and Muldoon- McGuckian-Carson generations.
This chapter looks at a number of plays that engage, directly or indirectly, with the experience of immigration as translated for the stage. The playwrights and artists explore subjectively, imaginatively the consciousness of others, and produce contact zones where changing concepts of Irishness and otherness can co-exist and be articulated in meaningful ways. Economic success, the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' phenomenon, and its attendant socio-political consequences, has given the country a new confidence whilst challenging or eroding the old markers of Irish identity. A number of recent Irish theatrical productions have engaged with the new phenomenon and its implications for Ireland's identity and self-image and these have become the object of critical inquiry. It is worth examining the use the playwright makes of anthropology and anthropometry as a metaphor and to examine how The Home Place can be read in terms of contemporary concerns.
Re-membering, putting together the pieces of a fractured psychological or historical puzzle is the first step to working through, and eventually forgetting, the long-term effects of trauma, whether at an individual or a collective level. The prominence of the issues of memory, remembrance and forgetting in recent Northern Irish fictions suggests a recognition of the difficulty and importance of such an undertaking in all its cultural, social and political implications. By singularising suffering, That Which Was also inevitably shows remembering and forgetting to be unusually painful and difficult experiences. The International is much concerned with the themes of memory and forgetting, and Danny Hamilton's recollections of pre-Troubles Belfast selfconsciously register the distortions and uncertainties that are inherent in the act of remembering. Bernard McLaverty's The Anatomy School, Eoin McNamee's The Blue Tango, David Park's The Big Snow novels recreate moments out of time from the decades prior to the Troubles.
John McGahern's country lanes in some ways hold secure the memory of a child happy in the presence of his mother, and they guarantee, as well, an enduring image of Ireland. Memoir suggests a recollection of actual events and experiences, with an implicit trust in the faithfulness of memory being shared by author and reader. Hugo Hamilton, in The Speckled People, recalls his father explaining the events that took place in west Cork in the 1920s. As Edna Longley's review makes clear, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark shares with The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing an interest in memoir and autobiography as significant narratives of Ireland. John Walsh's memoir The Falling Angels gives us an opportunity for examining diasporic Irish identity, especially that of second-generation Irish children growing up in England.