Irish Modernisms

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.

• ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Irish Modernisms in the PluralPaul Fagan (Salzburg University, Austria), John Greaney (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Tamara Radak (University of Vienna, Austria)Part 1Contested Canons: Testing the Limits of Irish Modernism 1. Explaining Ourselves: Hannah Berman, Jewish Nationalism and Irish ModernismJohn Brannigan (University College Dublin, Ireland)2. A Forgotten Irish Modernist: Ethel Colburn MayneElke D’hoker (KU Leuven, Belgium)3. Melancholy Modernism: The Loss of the Irish Woman Poet 1930–1950Lucy Collins (University College Dublin, Ireland)4. Death and the Nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen’s FictionMaureen O’Connor (University College Cork, Ireland)5. The Languages of Irish Modernism: Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel BeckettEoin Byrne (NUI Galway, Ireland)Part 2Corporeal Texts, Discursive Bodies: Biopolitical Irish Modernisms6. Irish Skin: The Epidermiology of ModernismBarry Sheils (Durham University, UK)7. Irish Modernism and Revivalism: A Queer History?Seán Hewitt (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)8. 'Survival of the Unfittest': Synge, Yeats and the Rhetoric of HealthLloyd (Meadhbh) Houston (University of Oxford, UK)9. Rhetorics of Sacrifice: Sex, Gender and the Death Penalty in James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and the 1916 GenerationKatherine Ebury (Sheffield University, UK)10. ‘The ranks of respectability’: Prostitution, Citizenship & the Free State in the Novels of Liam O’FlahertyLaura Lovejoy (University College Cork, Ireland)11. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett: Blind Bards in the Age of Silent CinemaCleo Hanaway-Oakley (Bristol University, UK)Part 3Minor/Major Forms: Intermedial Irish Modernisms12. Letters and Weak Theory in Irish ModernismMaebh Long (University of Waikato, New Zealand)13. The Machine in the (Holy) Ghost: Anti-Science Literature, Genre Fiction and Irish Modernism, 1890-1940Jack Fennell (University of Limerick, Ireland)14. Mechanical Animals, Flying Men and Educated Monkeys: Technology & Modernity in the Comic Strips of Jack B. YeatsMichael Connerty (Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland)15. ‘the funeral of one’s past’: Thomas MacGreevy as Ireland’s Modernist War PoetDaniel Curran (Maynooth University, Ireland)16. The Full Little Jug: Flann O’Brien and the Irish Public SphereCatherine Flynn (UC, Berkeley, USA)BibliographyIndex

This varied and vibrant collection accomplishes two huge tasks: consolidating the field of New Irish modernisms and exploring hitherto unperceived objects (journalism, letters, films, comic strips, lost poems, scientific writing, etc.) along with less visible actors. It is bracing to read Joyce with Hannah Berman, Beckett’s bilingualism with O’Nolan’s and Ó Cadhain’s, or place W. B. Yeats next to Thomas MacGreevy and Ethel Colburn Mayne. Those alert chronicles redeem the fullness of past Irish cultural history: whatever was old or unmodern is here made “fresh and strange.”