Writing Crisis in Ireland, 1596-2018

This volume reads Irish literature as a seismograph of Ireland’s crises. Ranging from a general theory of narration to that branch of narratology particularly concerned with the relationship between crisis and narrative, and then branching out to assess how the topos or metanarrative of ‘Ireland in Crisis’ came to be constructed and established in numerous narratives, it puts forth a series of extensive close readings ranging from the Early Modern period (Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) all the way to the twenty-first century (Milkman by Anna Burns). In shorter interludes, each work discussed is carefully placed in its respective media environments and genre traditions (including epic poetry, satire and pamphleteering, various forms of the novel, and modernist drama). Together, they illustrate how the works discussed speak to the crises of their time (the Famine, the Easter Rising, and the Troubles, among others), and how they oscillate between representation of crisis and broader epistemological concerns (crisis of representation). Writing Crisis is the first comprehensive study to deal with Ireland’s crises from a decidedly narratological vantage point.