Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature

Mary M. McGlynn is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.

• The Poor Mouth * James Joyce and the Urban Periphery: Towards a Working Class Modernism * 'Make out It_s Not Unnatural at All': Janice Galloway's Mother Tongue * Barrytown Irish: Location, Language, and Class in Roddy Doyle's early novels * 'Ye_ve No to Wander:' James Kelman's Vernacular Spaces * Eoin McNamee's Local Language * The Poor Mouth Revisited

"A welcome and useful study of a group of writers in need of more complex critical attention. By including both Irish and Scottish writers in the same study-and writers from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland-McGlynn enacts the challenge to national boundaries that her study uncovers. The potential impact of such a work on Irish literary studies is especially strong; too often, Irish literature is only studied within nationalist parameters." - Lauren Onkey, Associate Professor of English, Ball State University "McGlynn's book is an excellent choice for the series New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature, edited by Claire Culleton. It makes many important moves in this arena, not the least of which is its reconfiguration of what one might call the Celtic fringe, 'with literature as a key crossover" (Maley 205) ... I am grateful to have this thoughtful and careful work, which in forging yet new ground in this comparative filed of Scottish-Irish studies, brings understudied authors into view and provides an important model for talking about class in contemporary literatures more generally." - James Joyce Literary Supplement