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12 Contemporary Irish fiction and the indirect gaze Neil Murphy As one of the most dramatic socio-economic transformative periods in modern Irish history, the Celtic Tiger years offer us a provocative opportunity to consider the relationship between Irish literary fiction and its contexts. Since 1995, Irish society has experienced a plethora of complex adjustments to the economy, to the demographic distribution of people living in Ireland and to the religious landscape, and Ireland has become both an international brand name in the arts and a poster-girl for
4 Gothic inheritance and the Troubles in contemporary Irish fiction On 10 April 1998, the British and Irish governments signed the Good Friday Agreement, marking the official end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland – though not the cessation of violence. A year earlier, Jeffrey Glenn, a 46-year-old librarian in Ballynahinch, County Down, submitted an essay for a retrospective collection, Children of The Troubles: Our Lives in the Crossfire of Northern Ireland. In it, he recalls the pangs of terror he regularly experienced while growing up in a Belfast suburb in
Revolutionary bodies traces a style of homoerotic writing in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. As this study demonstrates, writers in that tradition explored a broad spectrum of cultural and political concerns, while experimenting with the conventions of literary realism. We witness how, in these various works, the longing for the male body is insistently associated with utopian political desire. Developing a series of innovative readings, the argument proceeds through three author-centred chapters (Brendan Behan; John Broderick; Colm Tóibín) followed by two chapters on Irish gay fiction and ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction. The latter two chapters focus on work by Keith Ridgway, Jamie O’Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others. Revolutionary Bodies prompts us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics, literature and sexual liberation.
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.
9780719075636_4_011.qxd 16/2/09 9:28 AM Page 201 11 ‘Tomorrow we will change our names, invent ourselves again’: Irish fiction and autobiography since 1990 Liam Harte [B]oomtime Ireland has yet to find its Oscar Wilde or its Charles Dickens or even its Evelyn Waugh. The strange place we now inhabit does not seem to yield up its stories easily. . . . What has happened, essentially, is that the emergence of a frantic, globalised, dislocated Ireland has deprived fiction writers of some of their traditional tools. One is a distinctive sense of place. To write
, I do not address the depictions of gay men in recent Irish fiction by authors who do not identify as gay, lesbian or queer; for instance, Belinda McKeon's Tender (2015), Ann Enright's The Green Road (2015) and Sebastian Barry's Days Without End (2016) and A Thousand Moons (2020). 26 However, this apparent contradiction illustrates my standpoint on sexual identity, which is broadly that model of ‘disidentification’ advocated by José Esteban Muñoz and Rosemary Hennessey. Muñoz adapted his theoretical
9780719075636_4_014.qxd 16/2/09 9:29 AM Page 250 14 Secret gardens: unearthing the truth in Patrick O’Keeffe’s The Hill Road Vivian Valvano Lynch The publication of Patrick O’Keeffe’s 2005 collection of four novellas, The Hill Road, marked the arrival of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. Born in Ireland in 1963, O’Keeffe grew up on a dairy farm in Limerick near the Tipperary border. At the age of twenty-three he emigrated to the United States, but only became legally resident there in 1989, after winning his green card in a lottery. His stories
6 The stranger in the fiction of John McGahern Željka Doljanin In 2005, near the end of the Irish economic boom that had brought wealth, foreign investment and a great number of foreign workers and asylumseekers to the country, the texture of Irish society was already visibly and irrevocably changed. In a short period of time Ireland became enriched: financially wealthy and multicultural. However, Irish fiction writers were slow to record the sweeping change, and by 20051 the absence of immigrant voices in literature was already noticeable. When David Marcus
9780719075636_4_016.qxd 16/2/09 9:29 AM Page 272 16 Remembering to forget: Northern Irish fiction after the Troubles Neal Alexander To speak of post-Troubles fiction, or even fiction ‘after’ the Troubles, is perhaps as problematic as it is unavoidable. Nearly a decade since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the political accord for which it paved the way remains fraught and uncertain. And if it can be said with at least some certainty that the war is finally over, then it is equally certain that Northern Ireland’s troubles are not. The latest edition of
that ‘[the] relationship of the Celtic diaspora to the English mainstream still remains to be properly investigated’ while the ‘difficulty’ of such an enterprise is explained as due to the complex history of political and linguistic development (1993: 62). Such (un)critical endorsement of ideological space (English centre, Celtic periphery) contributes to the process whereby that hegemonic space is reproduced and perpetuated. This chapter aspires to an alternative critical project: an analysis of contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction through a comparison of the