The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

by Maud Ellmann (Editor), Sian White (Editor), Vicki Mahaffey (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399548564
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2025
Series:	Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.77(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Maud Ellmann is Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. Her books include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment, and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. She has also published widely on modern literature and literary theory, feminism, and deconstruction.

Siân White is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of a range of published journal articles including ‘Spatial Politics/Poetics, Late Modernism and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September’, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 49.1 (2016): 27-50; ‘Ulysses, the Poetics of Tragedy, and A New Mimesis’, PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 51.4 (2015): 334-72; and ‘An Aesthetics of Unintimacy: Narrative Complexity in Elizabeth Bowen’s Style’, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 45.1 (Winter 2015), 79-104.

Vicki Mahaffey is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of Englishat the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Basil Blackwell, 2007); States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (Oxford UniversityPress, 1998); and Reauthorizing Joyce (UniversityPress of Florida, 1995).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

Robert JC Young