Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities

Focusing on previously unexplored theoretical gaps, limitations, and fresh avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism, this book interrogates marginalised and neglected figures and genres to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical space in which to reflect upon the field. Probing Irish modernism’s responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, this book uses diverse paradigms including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism, and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism’s organising themes: nationalism, martyrdom, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. At the same time, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalised importance of women’s writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde.

Foregrounding Irish modernist interfaces between visual, literary, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, this book focuses on writers, artists and cultural figures such as Hannah Berman, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Forrest Reid, Mary Davenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Edward Martyn, Jane Seosamh Ó Torna, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. At the same time, this volume asks how consideration of Irish modernism through the diverse genres and movements of these neglected and liminal figures compels us to reconsider the position of the ＂major (Irish) modernists＂ - such as Synge, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, O’Nolan, Beckett, MacGreevy, and Bowen - in this redrawn canon.

Paul Fagan is Senior Scientist at Salzburg University, co-head of the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies, and president of the International Flann O’Brien Society. He is series editor of both The Journal of Flann O’BrienStudies and Cork UP’s Flann O’Brien book series (4 volumes) and is completing a monograph on the Irish literary hoax.

John Greaney teaches in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland, and in the Department of English at Maynooth University. His primary research interests are concerned with Irish modernism and its conceptual parameters. With Paul Fagan and Tamara Radak, he is co-editing the forthcoming volume Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, (2020).

Tamara Radak is an external lecturer at the University of Vienna. Her publications include essays in James Joyce Quarterly, The Review of Irish Studiesin Europe, and European Joyce Studies. She is currently completing a monograph titled No Sense of an Ending? Modernist Aporias of Closure.