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The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

Online ISBN:
9780191816550
Print ISBN:
9780198754893
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

Liam Harte (ed.)
Liam Harte
(ed.)
Irish Literature, University of Manchester
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Liam Harte is Professor of Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. His publications as author and editor include A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007 (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Macmillan, 2000; co-edited with Michael Parker).

Published online:
8 October 2020
Published in print:
15 October 2020
Online ISBN:
9780191816550
Print ISBN:
9780198754893
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five distinguished scholars of Irish fiction. Collectively, they provide accessible and incisive assessments of the breadth and achievement of Ireland’s modern novelists and short story writers, whose contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to the country’s small size. The volume brings an impressive variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary-historical contexts. The Handbook’s coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the nature and function of the Irish Gothic mode; nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women’s fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.

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