Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology. Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.

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

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?

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.

"Focusing on previously unexplored theoretical gaps, limitations, and fresh avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism, this book interrogates marginalised and neglected figures and genres to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical space in which to reflect upon the field. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, this book uses diverse paradigms including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism, and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: nationalism, martyrdom, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. At the same time, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too often marginalised importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde. Foregrounding Irish modernist interfaces between visual, literary, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, this book focuses on writers, artists and cultural figures such as Hannah Berman, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Forrest Reid, Mary Davenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Edward Martyn, Jane Seosamh Ó Torna, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. At the same time, this volume asks how consideration of Irish modernism through the diverse genres and movements of these neglected and liminal figures compels us to reconsider the position of the "major (Irish) modernists" - such as Synge, Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, O'Nolan, Beckett, MacGreevy, and Bowen - in this redrawn canon"--

Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture explores manifestations of the themes, forms and practices of high modernism in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to this influential movement. The interdisciplinary collection reveals how Irish artists grapple with modernist legacies and forge new modes of expression for modern and contemporary culture.

An examination of the emergence, reception and legacy of modernism in Ireland. Engaging with the ongoing re-evaluation of regional and national modernisms, the essays collected here reveal both the importance of modernism to Ireland, and that of Ireland to modernism. This collection introduces fresh perspectives on modern Irish culture that reflect new understandings of the contradictory and contested nature of modernism itself.--