Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities

edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney & Tamara Radak

Radak, T., Fagan, P., & Greaney, J. (Hrsg.) (2021). Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities. Bloomsbury Academic.

 

From the publisher's website:

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications.

Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning.

Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?

 

 

Tamara Radak is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna.

Paul Fagan is a lecturer in cultural studies and modernism at the University of Vienna and a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University.

John Greaney is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt (2021-2023).