Irish Modernisms

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.<br/>Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies <i>Irish Modernisms: Gaps Conjectures Possibilities</i> 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?