Review of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021), edited by Paul Fagan, John Greaney and Tamara Radak (original) (raw)
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Irish Studies Review, 2018
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Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism
Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism, 2022
This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, to nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland’s precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry’s inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh; major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-counterpoetics-of-modernity.html
The Hysterical Body: deconstruction and confinement of the female body in the Irish Gothic
The Greek origin of the word 'hysteria' (ustera, meaning 'womb') testifies to its essential and essentialist implication with the female body. Until the end of the nineteenth century, women were generally described in the arts, in philosophical and medical discourses in binary structures, where the innocent and angelic maiden was opposed to the sensitive, melancholy or even lascivious type 1. It is thus unsurprising to observe converging discursive points between the application of medical theories onto the female body in scientific texts, and the expression of certain physiological anxieties in fiction, especially gothic fiction. This paper deals with those points of convergence within a particular corpus of Irish gothic fiction. Recent studies on the Irish gothic have specifically pointed to the ontological instability of such a literary tradition and have been inclined to use a variety of terms including 'mode', 'genre', 'aesthetic', 'register', 'tone' and 'tradition'. 2 A significant number of scholars have agreed on the use of 'gothic mode' in their attempt to acknowledge the porous nature of the Irish gothic. Richard Haslam thus defines the Irish gothic mode as a discontinuous series of themes, motifs and styles, selected by Beyond such terminological debates, another common claim in recent scholarship is the particular symmetry between genre and gender considerations in the gothic tradition 5. Indeed, the Irish gothic is partly characterized by relations of power and oppression (sexual, linguistic, political) between the female body and the patriarchal gothic space. Among the works which have been labelled as pertaining to the Irish gothic mode, some self-consciously display the traditional conventions of the eighteenth-century English gothic novel, while others shrewdly deviate from it, inscribing the Irish gothic into a productive generic marginality.
The Lie of The land: Irish Modernism in a Nativist Ireland
Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, Firenze University Press
In Waiting for Godot (1953) Beckett draws upon a non-temporal stasis that has paralyzed the nation over the past decades, and demystifies such a paralysis by structuring the play around not only a fixed milieu and an unnamable savior but also a widespread unwillingness in appreciating the urgency of this dominant spirit of stasis. I argue the roots of such severe pessimism, formlessness, and radical stasis as dominant elements in the works of Irish moderns can be found in a dichotomous perception of modernism and its emergence and development in post-independence Ireland. The rise of the State and their neoconservative politics of formation appear as internal forces that obstructed a proper appreciation of Irish modernism inside and outside Ireland. By exploring the roots of modernism in post-independence Ireland, and the conflict between modernism and the rise of a neocolonial State, this essay examines a critical and ideological reticence within the nation which considers Irish modernism as a sub-category of the movement rather than an independent variety, precluding a reading of Irish moderns in at once a national and international context.