Description:
Since the 1980s, Ireland has gone through a profound social, demographic, and religious disruption, the impact of which has been seen across recent fiction from Irish writers. Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces this cultural shift and its impact by examining how modern novels have reckoned with a new conception of Irishness.
Despite the heady mix of cultural and social destabilization, reform, and economic successes and challenges, this period of relentless disruption also offered immense imaginative possibilities for Irish writers. With change and structural transformation as the guiding principles, the work of Irish novelists during the modern era embraced changing values, a reimagining of cultural frames, and a rewriting of the primary narratives of what it meant to be Irish. Bringing together thirty scholars from across the field, Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel offers a complete contextualized reading to study vital changes in Irish national and cultural identity.Review Quotes: This edited collection offers a much-needed, updated overview of contemporary narratives, paying particular attention to textual and discursive experimentation as a mirror of transformations in contemporary Irish society.-- "Pilar Villar-Argáiz, author of Eavan Boland's Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider Within an Outsider's Culture"