Irish Modernism

This is the first interdisciplinary volume to present a sustained examination of the emergence, reception and legacy of modernism in Ireland. Engaging with the ongoing re-evaluation of regional and national modernisms, the essays collected here reveal both the importance of modernism to Ireland, and that of Ireland to modernism. Central concerns of the book include definitions of and critical contexts for an Irish modernism, issues of production, reception and the marketplace, new dialogues between literature and the visual arts in Ireland, modernism and Catholicism, and Irish modernism-s relationship with European and Anglo-American modernism. With contributions from established and emerging scholars in both Irish Studies and Modernist Studies, this collection introduces fresh perspectives on modern Irish culture that reflect new understandings of the contradictory and contested nature of modernism itself.

The Editors: Edwina Keown holds an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin and a B.A. (Hons) from Cardiff University. In 2007 she was the inaugural Lecturer in Irish Culture at Zagreb University. She lectures in Irish and English literature at St Patrick-s College, Dublin. Her research interests are in Anglo-Irish literature, Irish modernism, British modernism and twentieth-century Irish fiction and poetry. Carol Taaffe holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, where she was later IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of English. In 2007-8 she was Lecturer in Irish and British Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is the author of Ireland through the Looking-Glass: Flann O-Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and Irish Cultural Debate (2008).

Contents: Edwina Keown/Carol Taaffe: Introduction: Ireland and Modernism - Jean-Michel Rabaté: Dublin, 1913: Irish Modernism and International Modernism - Jim Shanahan: 'Vivid Irish History': Frank Mathew's The Wood of the Brambles and the Prehistory of Irish Modernist Fiction - Anne Markey: Modernism, Maunsel and the Irish Short Story - Michael McAteer: Expressionism, Ireland and the First World War: Yeats, O'Casey, McGuinness - Robert Baines: Seeing through the Mask: Valery Larbaud's 'James Joyce' and the Problem of Irish Modernism - Karen E. Brown: Thomas MacGreevy and Irish Modernism: Between Word and Image - Eamonn Hughes: Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Rhiannon Moss: Thomas MacGreevy, T.S. Eliot and Catholic Modernism in Ireland - Jennika Baines: A Rock and a Hard Place: Sweeny as Sisyphus and Job in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds - James Matthew Wilson: Late Modernism and the Marketplace in Denis Devlin's The Heavenly Foreigner - Róisín Kennedy: Experimentalism or Mere Chaos? The White Stag Group and the Reception of Subjective Art in Ireland - Ellen Rowley: Transitional Modernism: The Case of 1950s Church Architecture in Dublin - Edwina Keown: New Horizons: Irish Aviation, Lemass and Deferred Anglo-Irish Modernism in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love.