Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime

Maria McGarrity is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She has been published in journals including the James Joyce Quarterly, Ariel: a Review of International English Literature, CLA Journal, and The Journal of West Indian Literature. She has published two monographs, Washed by the Gulf Stream: the Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (Delaware, 2008) and Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide for Derek Walcott’s Masterpiece (Florida, 2015) and two co-edited collections, Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive (Palgrave, 2009) and Caribbean Irish Connections (University of the West Indies Press, 2015).

• Chapter One: IntroductionChapter Two: Performing the Primitive Sublime: the Celtic Revival and Irish IndigeneityChapter Three: James Joyce and the Primitive Sublime: from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans WakeChapter Four: Mid-century Malaise and Desublimation in Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Kate O’Brien, and Edna O’BrienChapter Five: The Living Dead: the Late Century Resurgence of the Primitive Sublime in works by Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Brian FrielChapter Six: Primitive Sublime Terror: Writing New York after 9/11 in O’Neill, McCann, and Tóibín