The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five distinguished scholars of Irish fiction. Collectively, they provide accessible and incisive assessments of the breadth and achievement of Ireland’s modern novelists and short story writers, whose contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to the country’s small size. The volume brings an impressive variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary-historical contexts. The Handbook’s coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the nature and function of the Irish Gothic mode; nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women’s fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.