Irish Urban Fictions, 1st ed. 2018
Literary Urban Studies Series

This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O?Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.

1. Introduction: Irish Urban Fictions - Maria Beville and Deirdre Flynn.- 2. Whose Dublin Is It Anyway? Joyce, Doyle, and the City - Eva Roa White.- 3. That Limerick Lady: Exploring the relationship between Kate O’Brien and her city - Maggie O’Neill.- 4. Migrants in the City: Dublin through the Stranger’s Eyes in Hugo Hamilton’s Hand in the Fire - Molly Ferguson.- 5. Chapter Four. Phantasmal Belfast, Ancient Languages, Modern Aura in Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory:Tim Keane.- 6.‘Neither this nor that’: The De-centred Textual City in Ulysses - Quyen Nguyen.- 7. Urban Degeneracy and the Free State in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds-  Laura Lovejoy.- 8. Putting the ‘Urban’ into ‘Disturbance’: Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane and the Irish Urban Gothic- Martyn Colebrook.- 9.  John Banville: The City as Illuminated Image. Neil Murphy.- 10. The Haunted Dublin of Ulysses: Two Modes of Time in the Second City of the Empire. Nikhil Gupta.- 11.‘It’s only history’: Belfast in Rosemary Jenkinson’s Short Fiction. Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado.- 12. The City of the Farset: Portrayals of Belfast in three novels by Glenn Patterson. Terry Phillips.

Maria Beville is a researcher, lecturer, and writer with the Centre for Studies in Otherness. Her research interests include Gothic studies, Irish Studies, and cultural theory. Working mostly with contemporary fiction and film, her recent research has focused on the supernatural city in literature. Her books include The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film (2013), The Gothic and the Everyday (co-edited 2014) and Gothic-postmodernism (2009). She is editor of the journal Otherness: Essays and Studies.

Deirdre Flynn is a lecturer in English Literature and Drama at Mary Immaculate College Limerick, and in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She was recently awarded a Moore Institute Visiting Scholar Fellowship for her work on the representation of female middle age in Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction. She lectures at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level in English Literature, and Drama and Theatre Studies. Her recent co-edited collection Representations of Loss in Irish Literature was published with Palgrave in June 2018.

Offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border

Considers the interiority of the city and the relationship between city and subject in order to discuss ‘belonging’ in the city and the initial constructions of identity for the Irish urbanite

Examines the imagined city and the frequent queer and uncanny depictions of the city that can be found in dystopian, fantastic and postmodern urban fictions

Explores how the city is written, not only in literature but from the perspective of each individual city dweller, it considers the Irish city in fiction as the city of change