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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.
6 ‘Who is Irish?’: Roddy Doyle’s hyphenated identities Eva Roa White As a result of its Celtic Tiger brief economic boom, Ireland has experienced a significant increase in inward migration. With the new influx of immigrants comes the necessity to pose the question ‘Who is Irish?’ In an effort to answer this question, Roddy Doyle, the only one of his siblings who did not emigrate, recounts the change in the traditional relationship Ireland has had with the experience of immigration, now that the tables are turned and Ireland is playing the role of host country
9780719075636_4_015.qxd 16/2/09 9:29 AM Page 258 15 ‘What’s it like being Irish?’ The return of the repressed in Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer Jennifer M. Jeffers ‘The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.’ (Roddy Doyle, The Commitments)1 In a notorious incident in January 2002, a young Chinese man, Zhao Liulao, was beaten to death in a late-night fight in a Dublin suburb, after being taunted by racist youths. This death occurred against a background of reports of increased attacks on immigrants in the north inner-city area of Dublin, in an area designated
and cultural phenomenon. I want to be careful to take into account all Irish writers – in other words, both those born in the country and those who arrived later – so that we can move beyond the legitimised readings of Irish multiculturalism to see the view from the back of the bus. The first section examines stories by Roddy Doyle and Claire Keegan that present multiculturalism as an obstacle that can be overcome by the goodwill of Irish people. In the second section, I turn to Emma Donoghue and Cauvery Madhavan, who depict Irish multiculturalism as a complicated
politics. Ironically, however, in the 1970s, the public became aware that Catholic priests had been using their office to sexually abuse women and children, thereby opening up room for a less censured view of the intersecting social agendas that comprised the Rising. A central part of the revolution registered at the time was a revolution of sexual and gender politics. This chapter will look at two novels that offer an alternative Rising narrative to replace the prominent Catholic nationalist rendering of that event: Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999) and Jamie O
constructions of Scotland and Ireland are almost changing faster than cultural representations can cope with. Roddy Doyle’s advice for the citizens of the Republic is apposite for those living throughout these islands: ‘You Norquay_10_Ch9 154 22/3/02, 10:06 am 155 Contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction should bring your passport to bed with you because you’re going to wake up in a different place’ (quoted in Smyth 1997: 102). It is also pertinent advice for writers of contemporary fiction in Ireland and Scotland. Nevertheless, the established cultural institutions
The rhetoric of ideology haunts Irish fiction. In this book, I map these rhetorical hauntings across a wide range of postcolonial Irish novels, and define the specter as a non-present presence that simultaneously symbolizes and analyzes an overlapping of Irish myth and Irish history. By exploring this exchange between literary discourse and historical events, Haunted Historiographies provides literary historians and cultural critics a theory of the specter that exposes the various complex ways in which novelists remember, represent, and reinvent historical narrative. Haunted Historiographies juxtaposes canonical and non-canonical novels that complicate long-held assumptions about four definitive events in modern Irish history—the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, the Second World War, and the Northern Irish Troubles—to demonstrate how historiographical Irish fiction from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Sebastian Barry is both a product of Ireland’s colonial history, and also the rhetorical means by which a post-colonial culture has emerged.
Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland is the first full-length monograph in the market to address the impact that Celtic-Tiger immigration has exerted on the poetry, drama and fiction of contemporary Irish writers. The book opens with a lively, challenging preface by Prof. Declan Kiberd and is followed by 18 essays by leading and prestigious scholars in the field of Irish studies from both sides of the Atlantic who address, in pioneering, differing and thus enriching ways, the emerging multiethnic character of Irish literature. Key areas of discussion are: What does it mean to be ‘multicultural,’ and what are the implications of this condition for contemporary Irish writers? How has literature in Ireland responded to inward migration? Have Irish writers reflected in their work (either explicitly or implicitly) the existence of migrant communities in Ireland? If so, are elements of Irish traditional culture and community maintained or transformed? What is the social and political efficacy of these intercultural artistic visions? While these issues have received sustained academic attention in literary contexts with longer traditions of migration, they have yet to be extensively addressed in Ireland today. The collection will thus be of interest to students and academics of contemporary literature as well as the general reader willing to learn more about Ireland and Irish culture. Overall, this book will become most useful to scholars working in Irish studies, contemporary Irish literature, multiculturalism, migration, globalisation and transculturality. Writers discussed include Hugo Hamilton, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Dermot Bolger, Chris Binchy, Michael O'Loughlin, Emer Martin, and Kate O'Riordan, amongst others.
generation of immigrants in Ireland. In particular, Adigun is well known for his rewriting in 2007 of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, a play co-written with Roddy Doyle which features a Nigerian Christy Mahon. Other theatrical multiethnic projects include the Dublin-based African theatre company, Arambe Productions, and ‘The Tower of Babel’, initiated by the Calypso theatre company. Both are successful attempts by immigrant artists and journalists to foster, in Reddy’s words (2007: 16), ‘an integrationist, celebrate-difference racial discourse’ in Ireland, one
the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess’ but which possesses them.36 This pathological condition is bound up with a profound crisis of historical truth which asks how we ‘can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access’.37 Caruth might be describing here the crisis that afflicts the protagonists of so many contemporary Irish novels, from Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle (1989) to Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing (1992) to Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry