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by Paul Fagan (Editor), John Greaney (Editor), Tamara Radak (Editor)
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?
Author Biography
Paul Fagan is a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University, Austria, President of the International Flann O'Brien Society, and a founding editor of The Journal of Flann O'Brien Studies. Fagan is the co-editor of Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (Irish Studies in Europe), four books dedicated to Flann O'Brien and serves on the editorial board of the Production Archives special collection. He has published widely on modernism and Irish studies, and is completing a monograph on the Irish literary hoax.
John Greaney is a Fulbright-NUI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation. His work has been published in Textual Practice, Irish Studies Review and Derrida Today, amongst other venues. Tamara Radak is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her publications include essays in James Joyce Quarterly, The Review of Irish Studies in Europe, Flann O'Brien: Problems with Authority and European Joyce Studies. She is currently completing a monograph titled No Sense of an Ending? Modernist Aporias of Closure. She is a member of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History and has been an invited speaker at the Trieste Joyce School and the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School.
