A History of Irish Modernism

Description

A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks (from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Gregory Castle is a professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge, 2001), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (2006) and The Literary Theory Handbook (2013). He has also published essays on the Bildungsroman and Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, James Joyce, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and Emily Lawless. His edited volumes include the Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (2010), A History of the Modernist Novel (Cambridge, 2015) and, with Patrick Bixby, Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition (2016). Patrick Bixby is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University and author of Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge, 2009), as well as co-editor, with Gregory Castle, of Standish O'Grady's Cuculain: A Critical Edition (2016). His essays have appeared in journals including Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, Irish Studies Review, and the Journal of Beckett Studies, in addition to collections such as A History of the Modernist Novel, Beckett in Context, Beckett and Ireland, and A New and Complex Sensation.

'... the editors write that they intend the volume 'to re-examine the dominant narrative of Irish modernism, to feature lesser-known figures and works, and to take into account social and political spheres ... in a variety of ways from a variety of perspectives' - a goal they achieve ... The collection demonstrates that Irish modernism is distinctly different from and much broader than traditional high modernism ... Recommended' C. E. Epple, Choice '... provides a helpful template with which to address the various artists and movements covered in the rest of the book ... the book achieves its goal through the course of its twenty three chapters and should be regarded as a serious collection.' Feargal Whelan, Estudios Irlandeses