The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism

Description

The story of Irish modernism constitutes a remarkable chapter in the movement's history. This volume serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped to create a distinctive nationalist literature but also changed the face of European and anglophone culture. This Companion surveys developments in modernist poetry, drama, fiction and the visual arts. Early innovators, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jack B. Yeats and James Joyce, as well as late modernists, including Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Mairtin O Cadhain and Francis Bacon, all appear here. Significantly, however, this volume ranges beyond such iconic figures to open up new ground with chapters on Irish women modernists, Irish American modernism, Irish language modernism and the critical reception of modernism in Ireland.

Joe Cleary is a Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and a visiting professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge, 2002) and Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (2007). He has also co-edited (with Claire Connolly) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge, 2005) and (with Michael de Nie) a special issue of Eire-Ireland on empire studies. He has previously served as director of the Notre Dame Irish Seminar in Dublin and was a visiting professor at Notre Dame in 2000. His articles have appeared in Textual Practice, South Atlantic Quarterly, Boundary 2, Modern Language Quarterly, Field Day Review, Eire-Ireland, and other journals. He is currently working on books on modernism, empire and the restructuring of world literature in early twentieth-century Europe and on a study of the history of twentieth-century Irish cultural criticism.

'The list of contributors is a who's who of scholars working in the field. A comprehensive time line in the first few pages provides a thorough historical grounding in the socioeconomic, political and cultural events that contributed to the formation of Irish modernism. If this book is treated as the first window into the wider world of scholarship, then Cleary has more than ably accomplished his task.' A. P. Pennino, Choice '... remarkably successful ... wide-ranging yet remarkably coherent, a notable achievement ... Canadian Journal of Irish Studies