{"title":"W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones and the Limits of Global Modernism","authors":"Cóilín Parsons","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This piece attempts to reconcile specificity with abstraction, Ireland with Japan, the present with the past in The Dreaming of the Bones. The landscape works as a historical palimpsest of a contested history, a balancing of the poetics of place and non-place. Yeats maps his world using different scales of measurement.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130347406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Watery Modernism? Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman","authors":"C. Connolly","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0026","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter adopts the lens of ecocriticism to compare Yeats’s early novel John Sherman (1891) to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), both of which are set in West of Ireland, a region imperilled by modernization in cultural and environmental terms. Published over a century apart, these novels mobilise modernist forms and themes in partial and selective ways to think about water as political, cultural and environmental threshold in the Anthropocene. The bodies of water that surround, permeate and shape the archipelago are the result of gradual geological or climatic change over time but also carry centuries of colonial and imperial history, played out on riverbanks, coasts and shores. In both novels, geography mutates through and against infrastructure, as journeys unfold along shipping routes, roads and railways.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130657687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hereseas: Water in English and Irish Modernism","authors":"Nels C. Pearson","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues for a spatial understanding of Irish modernity and modernism that stresses the island’s geographical, historical, and symbolic connection to the sea. Surrounded by sea and laced with waterways, Ireland has a long history of archipelagic and continental maritime connectivity. In the Irish imaginary, the sea has figured as both a threat and a lure, bringing imperialist invaders to the island but also fostering economic and cultural commerce with a wider world. At times Irish nationalism has adopted a defensive posture towards the sea by insisting on an insular conception of national identity that defies the multicultural influences of the sea. Irish modernism registers the island as both enmeshed in and estranged from water routes, both alienated from and participating in global circulation.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"173 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124230799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modernism Against / For the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan","authors":"Shan-Yun Huang","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how Irish Home Rule, the Irish Revival, and modernist aesthetic experiments – particularly those of Joyce – influenced similar nationalist, cultural, and aesthetic developments in Taiwan, the ‘Ireland of Asia’. Focusing largely on Wang Wen-hsing, an experimental writer known as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’, Huang shows how Wang’s novel Family Catastrophe (Jiabian, 1972) became a lightning rod for heated debates between modernists and nativists—debates that echoed similar conflicts between modernists and revivalists in Ireland. Citing Susan Stanford Friedman’s argument that non-Western modernisms are ‘different, not derivative’, Huang identifies a fundamental paradox in Wang’s Taiwanese modernism: rather than signalling a betrayal of native culture, Wang’s ‘Westernization’ made him native and his work, in turn, indigenized the West.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121920773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Irish Bachelor","authors":"E. Madden","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"An exploration of the figure of the sexually frustrated and socially isolated bachelor farmer that became popular beginning in the 1930s. The essay sees the bachelor as a figure of gender resistance. Instead of stereotyping him as an example of religious repression and family pathologies, it reframes him as the victim of state regulation and suppression.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"304 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132315111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Out of Ireland","authors":"Maud Ellmann","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Given that “modernism” is usually associated with the metropole, and “Irish” with provincialism and cultural conservatism, the title of this Companion might be seen as something of an oxymoron. The definition of “Irish” is complicated by the island’s history of partition and diaspora, while the traditional male Olympiad of Irish modernism—Joyce, Yeats, Beckett—has been shaken up by feminist, postcolonial, environmental, New Materialist, and other critical challenges. This Companion defines modernism as resistance to orthodoxy, drawing attention to the historical coincidence of modernism in the arts with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, which was condemned by Pope Pius X as the “synthesis of all heresies.” Taking a hint from the Pope, this Companion pinpoints five heresies, or modes of resistance to orthodoxy, which furnish the subtitles for each section of the book: heresies of time and space, heresies of nationalism, aesthetic heresies, heresies of gender and sexuality, and critical heresies. This introduction provides an overview of each heresy, followed by brief summaries of the chapters under its rubric. It also offers pointers for further study of modernist music, visual art, and architecture in Ireland.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"19 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132145399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border","authors":"Maud Ellmann","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the impact on recent Irish fiction of the border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, ‘the most militarised border in the archipelago’. This border is deplored as a spatial heresy by Irish nationalists who envision a united Ireland, but defended as an orthodoxy by Unionists who insist on their political allegiance to the British state. This chapter compares two thrillers set in borderland territory, Eugene McCabe’s Victims and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera, with Anna Burns’s deconstructed bildungsroman No Bones, set in Belfast. While McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas rework the conventions of the Big House novel, with its traditional focus on domestic space, at once imprisoning and open to invasion, Burns shows how the border spreads division through the home, the city, and the mind, undermining the distinction between outside and inside, public strife and private madness.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"239 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114475028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘A form that accommodates the mess’: Degeneration and / as Disability in Beckett’s Happy Days","authors":"Seán Kennedy, J. Valente","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0022","url":null,"abstract":"The essay begins with Max Nordau’s theory of degeneration, which intact form signals cultural health and broken form cultural deterioration, to show how Samuel Beckett de-pathologized the indices of degeneracy by finding a form to “normalize” the messy feelings of non-normative experience. Beckett uses disability as aesthetic principle by formalising affect, thereby universalizing divergence from ideals of embodiment.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121433886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenging the Iconic Feminine in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin","authors":"A. Darcy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0021","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter shows how poets Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin dissent from both the longstanding orthodoxy of the Catholic Church and the newly ascendant orthodoxy of secular neoliberalism. Writing in the Irish language, itself a pocket of resistance to the bureaucratic languages of capitalism, Ní Dhomhnaill and Ní Chuilleanáin call on relics or ‘ruins’ of the past, such as the ‘síscéal’ (fairy tale) and the keen, to challenge the reigning ideology of growth and progress. While dismantling the ‘iconic feminine’—that is, the myth of the sexless selfless mother enshrined in both Catholic and nationalist ideology—these poets recover forms of female ritual and discourse that resist global secular capitalism.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"242 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115110105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction","authors":"Sian White","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456692.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses the relationship between gender and narrative agency in three recent experimental novels by women writers, Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), and Anna Burns’s Milkman, which won the Booker Prize in 2018. These novels build on the modernist legacy of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien by using experimental form specifically to critique orthodoxies of gendered power. All depict women and children injured and exploited by men but assign these victims the role of narrator, much as the #MeToo movement has encouraged survivors to speak out against sexual violence and harassment. Though survivors’ testimony is routinely silenced or disbelieved because of unconventional expression, these narrators’ seemingly unreliable accounts – subjective, fragmented, digressive – paradoxically confer credibility on their voices.","PeriodicalId":371259,"journal":{"name":"The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130958055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}