Light and the lens: streams of damaged consciousness in post-crash Irish modernist fiction
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Date
29/06/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
29/06/2021Author
Ward Sell, Aran Foss
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Abstract
This thesis examines the state of Irish literature since the 2008-9 financial crash. I contend
that, whilst a supposedly mature Realism was the dominant mode of Irish writing during
the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years of economic boom, since the crash an identifiably Modernist
literary movement has (re-)emerged. Examples of this re-emergent Modernism are
Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), Anakana Schofield’s Malarky (2012)
and Martin John (2015), Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone (2015) and Mike McCormack’s Solar
Bones (2016). I position these texts in relation to discourses of both Realism and
Postmodernism, and to Irish High Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that they
represent a dynamic extension of Modernist aesthetics, not merely a static recapitulation
of Modernist convention.
I argue that the terms Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism (and
‘Metamodernism’, a recent category in which I include Barry’s Beatlebone) more usefully
denote literary techniques with a particular aesthetic/political relationship to the world,
than fixed historical periods. I analyse these texts’ use of such Modernist techniques
through a theoretical lens which draws upon debates concerning literary form in
twentieth-century Marxism, Gramscian theories of hegemony (notably as developed by
Raymond Williams), Marxist-influenced theorisation of Ireland and Irishness, and
linguistic criticism which contrasts Modernist interrogation and fracture with Realist
meta-language and closure. I examine both the narratological techniques which comprise
these texts’ ‘Modernism’, and also the material circumstances of their publication, which
has relied heavily on a small group of Arts Council-supported small presses and literary
magazines. My thesis also draws on contemporary journalism, both with regard to the
economic context of Celtic Tiger and post-crash Ireland and to the reception of my
primary texts.
The thesis ends with a ‘coda’, which treats the immediately post-crash rejuvenation of
Irish Modernism as a closed (or closing) historical moment, and speculates whether Irish
Modernist aesthetics will continue to innovate and interrogate (as suggested by Anna
Burns’ Milkman (2018)), or whether this ‘Movement’ is already expiring, to be replaced
by a socially liberal but formally conservative return to Realist aesthetics (as suggested
by Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018)).