A History of Irish Modernism

A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks (from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Introduction: Irish modernism, from emergence to emergency Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby; Part I. Revivals: 1. Gothic revivals: the Fin De Siècle, Irish modernism, and the heritage of Wilde and Stoker John Paul Riquelme; 2. Standish O'Grady and the historical imagination of Irish modernism Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby; 3. Yeats, the Abbey and theatrical modernism Christopher Morash; 4. J. M. Synge: late Romantic or proto-modernist? Nicholas Grene; 5. Internal others: cultural debate and counter-revival Ronan McDonald; Part II. Revolutions: 6. Naturalism and the literary politics of Irish modernist fiction Simon Joyce; 7. Towards a modernism of the book: from Dun Emer to Shakespeare and Company Clare Hutton; 8. Rebellious devotion: Catholicism and the limits of modernism Michael Cronin; 9. Irish modernism: the European influence Enda Duffy; 10. Yeats and the revolutionary poetics of age Michael Wood; 11. Material modernism: an Irish case, circa 1921 Nicholas Allen; Part III. New States: 12. From Whiteboys to white nationalism: Joyce and Irish populism Joseph Valente; 13. Sean O'Casey's late modernism: gender, race, and disabled bodies on the Irish expressionist stage Paige Reynolds; 14. Feeling disaffection: forms of estrangement in Irish fiction Derek Hand; 15. Atlantic archipelagos: the Irish American ecologies of late modernism John Brannigan; 16. A disruptive modernist: Kate O'Brien and Irish women's writing Gerardine Meaney; 17. After Yeats: local, regional, and transatlantic modernisms Adrienne Leavy; Part IV. Emergenc(i)es: 18. Irish writing and minor language modernism Barry McCrea; 19. Time made audible: Irish stations and radio modernism Damien Keane; 20. 'No Irishness intended': the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Thomas MacGreevy, and Samuel Beckett Luke Gibbons; 21. Was The Bell modernist? Frank Shovlin; 22. Samuel Beckett, late modernism, and the paradox of distance Emilie Morin; 23. 1966: the binary conditions of Irish architectural modernism Ellen Rowley.

Gregory Castle is a professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge, 2001), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (2006) and The Literary Theory Handbook (2013). He has also published essays on the Bildungsroman and Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and Emily Lawless. His edited volumes include the Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (2010), A History of the Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2015) and, with Patrick Bixby, Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition (2016).
Patrick Bixby is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University and author of Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge, 2009), as well as co-editor, with Gregory Castle, of Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition (2016). His essays have appeared in journals including Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, Irish Studies Review, and the Journal of Beckett Studies, in addition to collections such as A History of the Modernist Novel, Beckett in Context, Beckett and Ireland, and A New and Complex Sensation.