The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism
Edited by Maud Ellmann, Sian White, Vicki Mahaffey
- Investigates connections between literary modernism and other cultural forms such as journalism and literature in Irish; design, cinema, and stained glass; sexual mores and food etiquette; maps, waterways, and postage stamps
- Enriches the canon of Irish modernism by recovering lesser-known works by both neglected and canonical writers, especially women poets and novelists
- Frames Irish modernism in contexts both local – including geography and the environment – and global, attending to transnational crosscurrents of Irish culture
The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism presents a fresh perspective on received understandings of Irish modernism. The introduction draws connections between modernism in the arts and modernism as a resistant, liberal, relativist movement within the Catholic Church that was gathering momentum in the same period. In religion as in culture, resistance to orthodoxy has persisted, and for this reason this companion explores modernist heresies – cultural, aesthetic, critical, epistemological – that stretch back to the late nineteenth-century and forward to present day. Contributors widen the temporal, conceptual, generic, and geographical definitions of Irish modernism by investigating crosscurrents between literary form and cultural transformation through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book enriches the canon of Irish modernism by recovering lesser-known works by both neglected and canonical writers, especially women poets and novelists.
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Out of Ireland - Maud Ellmann
Part I: Heresies of Time and Space
1. Rising Timely and Untimely: On Joycean Anachronism - Paul Saint-Amour
2. Temporal Powers: Second Sight, the Future, and Celtic Modernity - Luke Gibbons
3. Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake - Jeremy Colangelo
4. W.B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and the Limits of Global Modernism - Cóilín Parsons
5. Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border - Maud Ellmann
6. Hereseas: Water in English and Irish Modernism - Nels Pearson
Part II: Heresies of Nationalism
7. ‘A Fairy Boy of Eleven, a Changeling, Kidnapped, Dressed in an Eton Suit’: Precarious, Lost, and Recovered Children in Anglophone Irish Modernism - Margot Backus
8. Legacies of Land and Soil: Irish Drama, European Integration, and the Unfinished Business of Modernism - Sarah Townsend
9. Ireland’s Philatelic Modernism - Julieann Veronica Ulin
10. Modernism against/for the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Post-War Taiwan - Shan-Yun Huang
11. Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Center of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy - Kathryn Conrad
PartIII: Aesthetic Heresies
12. Modern Irish Poetry and the Heresy of Modernism - Eric Falci
13. Modernist Heresies: Irish Visual Culture and the Arts and Crafts movement - Kelly Sullivan
14. The Insurgent Romance and Early Cinema in Ireland - Matthew Brown
15. ‘Put "Molotoff bread-basket" into Irish, please’: Cruiskeen Lawn, Dada and the Blitz - Catherine Flynn
16. Irish Christian Comedy: Heresy or Reform? - Vicki Mahaffey
Part IV: Heresies of Gender and Sexuality
17. The Irish Bachelor - Ed Madden
18. ‘Purity, Piety, and Simplicity’: Heretical Images of the Female Catholic Reader in Irish Modernism - T.J. Boynton
19. ‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption in the Late Novels of Molly Keane - Lauren Rich
20. ‘Stories Are A Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction - Siân White
21. Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - Ailbhe Darcy
Part V: Critical Heresies
22. ‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and/as Disability in Beckett’s Happy Days - Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente
23. Jumping Cats and Living Handkerchiefs: The Queer and Comic Non-Human World of Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction - Maureen O’Connor
24. Theorising Irish-Language Modernism: Voicing Precarity - Sarah McKibben
25. Affective Alchemy: W. B. Yeats and the Heresy of Joy - Wendy Truran
26. Watery modernism? Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman - Claire Connolly
Index
This outstanding collection of ‘critical heresies’ on Irish modernism transforms and reshapes our understanding of Irish Literature just as it will impact dynamically on modernism studies at large.
