Irish Literature in Transition: 1980-2020: Volume 6

Description

Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 elucidates the central features of Irish literature during the twentieth century's long turn, covering its significant trends and formations, reassessing its major writers and texts, and providing path-making accounts of its emergent figures. Over the past forty years, life in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has been transformed by new material conditions in each polity and by ideological shifts in the way people understand themselves and their relation to the world. Amid these remarkable changes, culture on both sides of the border has emerged as a global phenomenon, one that both reflects and intervenes in rapidly changing contemporary conditions. This volume accounts for broad patterns of literary and cultural production in this period and demonstrates the value of Irish contemporary literature within anglophone and European traditions and as a body of work that has kept its eye trained on the particularities of the island and its inhabitants.

Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (Cambridge, 2012) and the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (Cambridge, 2015), as well as a number of essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry. Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, is the author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge, 2007) and editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (2016). She has published essays on modernism, drama, and contemporary Irish writing and performance, and is editor of the forthcoming collection The New Irish Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions.

'This is an extraordinary achievement, a hugely enjoyable and instructive read. It does not leave Irish Studies as it found it, instead renovating and extending the subject.' Anthony Roche, Irish Times 'These reckonings acutely register the 'future's productively uncertain relation to the present world', as Falci writes of Boland and Heaney, and establishes the strengths and challenges of Irish Studies within this unpredictable present.' Liam Harisson, Irish Studies Review