Distance of Irish Modernism
Subtitle: Memory, Narrative, Representation
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2022
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9781350125261
Description: "Rethinking the relationship between form and history in Irish modernist writing and its aftermath, this book examines how critics have previously categorized the Irish modernist novel, as an evidentiary form of cultural memory. John Greaney exposes the problems with such a stance, exploring this paradox by analysing novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John McGahern through new critical paradigms in modernist studies. This approach contrasts the untranslatable gap between modernist literature and national history (world literature, translation studies) with materialist approaches to modernism (affect theory, new materialism), and in so doing delineates how Irish modernism becomes both a world problematic as well as a container for national history. As such, The Distance of Irish Modernism demonstrates that modernist fictions, and fictions influenced by the legacies of modernism, are engaged with but different to the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Constituting new methodologies for understanding how stories are told and memories are formulated in and after Irish modernist writing, this book re-conceptualizes the parameters of Irish modernism."--