Irish Modernisms

Focusing on previously unexplored theoretical gaps, limitations, and fresh avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism, this book interrogates marginalised and neglected figures and genres to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical space in which to reflect upon the field. Probing Irish modernism’s responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, this book uses diverse paradigms including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism, and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism’s organising themes: nationalism, martyrdom, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. At the same time, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalised importance of women’s writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde. Foregrounding Irish modernist interfaces between visual, literary, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, this book focuses on writers, artists and cultural figures such as Hannah Berman, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Forrest Reid, Mary Davenport O’Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Edward Martyn, Jane Seosamh Ó Torna, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. At the same time, this volume asks how consideration of Irish modernism through the diverse genres and movements of these neglected and liminal figures compels us to reconsider the position of the “major (Irish) modernists” - such as Synge, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, O’Nolan, Beckett, MacGreevy, and Bowen - in this redrawn canon.