The Distance of Irish Modernism interrogates the paradox through which Irish modernist fictions have become containers for national and transnational histories while such texts are often oblique and perverse in terms of their times and geographies. John Greaney explores this paradox to launch a metacritical study of the modes of inquiry used to define Irish modernism in the 21st century. Focused on works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Flann O'Brien and Kate O'Brien, this book analyses how and if the complex representational strategies of modernist fictions provide a window on historical events and realities. Greaney deploys close reading, formal analysis, narratology and philosophical accounts of literature alongside historicist and materialist approaches, as well as postcolonial and world literature paradigms, to examine how modernist texts engage the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Emphasizing the proximities and the distances between modernist aesthetic practice and the history of modernity in Ireland and beyond, this book enables a new model for narrating Irish modernism.

The Distance of Irish Modernism interrogates the paradox through which Irish modernist fictions have become containers for national and transnational histories while such texts are often oblique and perverse in terms of their times and geographies. John Greaney explores this paradox to launch a metacritical study of the modes of inquiry used to define Irish modernism in the 21st century. Focused on works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Flann O'Brien and Kate O'Brien, this book analyses how and if the complex representational strategies of modernist fictions provide a window on historical events and realities. Greaney deploys close reading, formal analysis, narratology and philosophical accounts of literature alongside historicist and materialist approaches, as well as postcolonial and world literature paradigms, to examine how modernist texts engage the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Emphasizing the proximities and the distances between modernist aesthetic practice and the history of modernity in Ireland and beyond, this book enables a new model for narrating Irish modernism.

This book attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns.

"Rethinking the relationship between form and history in Irish modernist writing and its aftermath, this book examines how critics have previously categorized the Irish modernist novel, as an evidentiary form of cultural memory. John Greaney exposes the problems with such a stance, exploring this paradox by analysing novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John McGahern through new critical paradigms in modernist studies. This approach contrasts the untranslatable gap between modernist literature and national history (world literature, translation studies) with materialist approaches to modernism (affect theory, new materialism), and in so doing delineates how Irish modernism becomes both a world problematic as well as a container for national history. As such, The Distance of Irish Modernism demonstrates that modernist fictions, and fictions influenced by the legacies of modernism, are engaged with but different to the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Constituting new methodologies for understanding how stories are told and memories are formulated in and after Irish modernist writing, this book re-conceptualizes the parameters of Irish modernism."--

This book argues that literary modernists engaged creatively with modernity's expanding forms of collective experience and performative identities; their work clarifies how popular subjectivity evolves from a nineteenth-century liberal citizenry to the contemporary sense of a range of political multitudes struggling with conditions of oppression.

"Rethinking the relationship between form and history in Irish modernist writing and its aftermath, this book examines how critics have previously categorized the Irish modernist novel, as an evidentiary form of cultural memory. John Greaney exposes the problems with such a stance, exploring this paradox by analysing novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John McGahern through new critical paradigms in modernist studies. This approach contrasts the untranslatable gap between modernist literature and national history (world literature, translation studies) with materialist approaches to modernism (affect theory, new materialism), and in so doing delineates how Irish modernism becomes both a world problematic as well as a container for national history. As such, The Distance of Irish Modernism demonstrates that modernist fictions, and fictions influenced by the legacies of modernism, are engaged with but different to the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Constituting new methodologies for understanding how stories are told and memories are formulated in and after Irish modernist writing, this book re-conceptualizes the parameters of Irish modernism"--

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.