Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumptive habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland's progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism--like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O'Casey--depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country's most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed--less an aesthetic device than a "thing" belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve 'magical thinking'. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. This study offers provocative interpretations of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific culture in relation to psychoanalysis, queer theory and cultural history.

This volume, exploring the worlds of science and technology in 19th-century Ireland and emanating from the 2009 Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland Conference, offers fascinating perspectives from science, literature, history, and archaeology.

Industrial modernity takes it as self-evident that there is a difference between people and machines, but the corollary of this has been a recurring fantasy about the erasure of that difference. The central scenario in this fantasy is the crash, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical. Nicholas Daly considers the way human/machine encounters have been imagined from the 1860s on, arguing that such scenes dramatize the modernization of subjectivity. This book will be of interest to scholars of moderinism, literature and film.

These essays offer fascinating insights into the role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture. They explore the importance of food in Irish writing; culinary practices among the 1950s Dublin working class; new trends among Ireland's 'foodie' generation; and the economic and tourism possibilities created by gastronomic nationalism.

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.