Representations of Loss in Irish Literature

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

Deirdre Flynn is Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has worked at the Moore Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She has lectured at undergraduate and postgraduate level in English Literature and Drama and Theatre Studies. Her research interests include world literature, postmodernism, Murakami, Irish studies and feminism. Eugene O'Brien is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, and Director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies. He is also the editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory. He has written six single author books and edited or co-edited a further seven. His most recent books are: Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker, The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Tracing the Cultural Legacy of Irish Catholicism: From Galway to Cloyne, and Beyond, edited with Eamon Maher.

1. Introduction: Defining Representations of Loss.- 2. 'In search of lost history: Embodied Memory and the Material Past in post-millennial Irish fiction'; Maria Beville.- 3. Holding on to 'rites, rhythms and rituals' Mike McCormack's homage to small town Irish life and death; Deirdre Flynn.- 4. Evental Time and The Untime in Finnegans Wake; Shahriyar Mansouri.- 5. 'It's only history': Post-Agreement Belfast in Rosemary Jenkinson's Short Fiction; Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado.- 6. 'A Pure Change Happened': Seamus Heaney and the Poetry of Loss; Eugene O'Brien.- 7. Lost? Technology and Place in Recent Irish Poetry; Anne Karhio.- 8. Resisting Profit and Loss in Contemporary Irish EcoPoetry; Eoin Flannery.- 9. Grief, Guilt, and Ghosts: Fantastic Strategies of Staging Loss on the Contemporary Irish Stage; Eva Marie Kubin.- 10. 'The wake? What of it?': Figures of Loss in the Migrant Plays of Colm Ó Clubhán; Ed Madden.