1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing
This Companion brings together leading scholars in the field of Irish studies to explore the significance of twenty-first century Irish writing and its flourishing popularity worldwide. Focusing on Irish writing published or performed in the 21st-century, this volume explores genres, modes, and styles of writing that are current, relevant, and distinctive in today’s classrooms. Examining a host of innovative, key writers, including Sally Rooney, Marion Keyes, Sebastian Barry, Paul Howard, Claire Kilroy, Micheal O’Siadhail, Donal Ryan, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh, Colette Bryce, Leanne Quinn, Sinéad Morrissey, Paula Meehan, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Doireann Ni Ghríofa. This text investigates the socio-cultural and theoretical contexts of their aesthetic achievements and innovations. Furthermore, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing traces the expansion of Irish writing, offering fresh insight to Irish identities across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. With its distinctive contemporary contexts and comprehensive scope, this multifaceted volume provides the first significant literary history of 21st century Irish literature.
I. Narrative Imaginings: Between Ideology and Resistance
1. Counterfactual Geographies: Creating Urban Space in Post-Crash Irish Fiction
Liam Lanigan
2. Representations of Catholicism in Contemporary Irish Fiction
Eamon Maher
3. Four Recent Irish-language Novels, A Century after Pearse
Máire Ní Annracháin
4. Conversational Ethics and Aesthetics in the Contemporary Family Novel: Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) and Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island (2022)
Katharina Rennhak
5. Liquid Modernity and Twenty-First Century Irish Young Adult Fiction
Ian Hickey
6. The Biopolitics of Emotions and the Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary Irish Writing by Non-White Authors
Jun Du
7. Embodied Pasts and Precarious Futures: Somatic Storytelling in Trespasses (2022) and Close to Home (2023)
Caroline Magennis
8. The Ethics of Care in Sally Rooney’s Novels: Between Self and Other
María Amor Barros-del Río
9. ‘Feeling Catty’: Reading Animals in Short Stories by Contemporary Irish Women Writers
Anne Fogarty
II. A Poetics of the Unfinished and the Transformative
10. Remapping Ireland in Poems by Paula Cunningham, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanaín and Nithy Kasa
Lucy McDiarmid
11. Twenty-First Century Migrant Irish Poets in the UK: Martina Evans and Fran Lock
Ailbhe Darcy
12. ‘The art of yielding’: Contemporary Irish Ecopoetics
Eoin Flannery
13. Wilful renewing: Tradition and Innovation in the work of Aifric Mac Aodha and Séamus Barra Ó Súilleabháin
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
14. Micheal O’Siadhail: Intersecting, Resonant and Polyglot Voices
Eugene O’Brien
15. Queer Poetry
Kit Fryatt
16. ‘The Art of Losing’: Ailbhe Darcy’s Ekphrastic Touch
Daniela Theinová
17. ‘Echo is dumb’: Modes of Address and Generational Dialogue in Irish Poetry
David Wheatley
18 ‘Memory followed you / on the water’: Oceanic Perspectives in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry
Lucy Collins
III. Theatrical Engagements and Critiques
19. Ecodramaturgy and the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Abbey Theatre’s Adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (2020)
Patrick Lonergan
20. THISISPOPBABY: Glorious Energy, Grief, and the Twenty-First Century Craic Tax
Martin Kenny and Miriam Haughton
21. Class Matters: Working-Class Theatre in the Wake of the Economic Crash
Clara Mallon
22. Talking about Sex in Twenty-First-Century Irish Prose and Performance
Paige Reynolds
23. Ethnotheatre in Northern Ireland: Research-Led Work by Kabosh Theatre Company
Lisa Fitzpatrick
24. Visceral Injustices in The Blue Boy (2011), Woman Undone (2018) and The Examination (2019) by Brokentalkers
Eamonn Jordan
25. Agonistic Spaces: Dissensus and Ethical Conflicts in Recent Irish Theatre
Clare Wallace
IV New Voices, New Forms, New Modes of Material Production
26. The Rise of Ireland’s Campus Novel
Deirdre Flynn
27. Irish Fantasy Fiction in the Twenty-First Century
Jack Fennell
28. The Personal Essay
Claire Lynch
29. Global Irish Crime Fiction in the Twenty-First Century: Expanding the Scope
Molly Slavin
30. Contemporary Irish Poetry off the Page
Julie Morrissy
31. Still Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Epochal Change in Twenty-First -Century Irish Poetry
Alexander Muller and Jefferson Holdridge
32. Changing Irish Identity: Black Writing in Contemporary Ireland
Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro and Victor Augusto da Cruz Pacheco
33. The Stinging Fly and Contemporary Irish Short Fiction
34. The Journal Era: Style and Twenty-First Century Irish Literary Magazines
Liam Harrison
35. Languages and Publishing in Contemporary Irish Writing
Tim Groenland and Margaret Kelleher
Biography
Anne Fogarty is Professor Emerita of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin. She was Associate Director of the Yeats International Summer School 1995-7 and Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School 2017-2023. She was editor of the Irish University Review 2002-2009 and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal 2008-2023. Currently, she is editor for the Irish Writers series for Bucknell University Press. She has co-edited several collections of essays on Joyce and recently co-edited with Marisol Morales-Ladrón, Deirdre Madden: New Critical Perspectives (2022) and with Tina O’Toole, Reading Gender and Space (2023). She has published widely on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish writing, especially on the Revival period, and on women authors. Her new edition of Dubliners is forthcoming from Penguin in 2025.
Eugene O’Brien is Professor of English Literature and Theory, and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He is the editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory, and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series. His books include Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis (with Andrew J. Auge) (Routledge, 2021) and Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century (with Eamon Maher) (Peter Lang, 2021). His latest book, Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, was published by Routledge in 2023. A co-edited volume of Études-Irlandaises 49 (1), Contemporary Irish Poetics (with Eóin Flannery), and a co-edited book, The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose, with Ian Hickey (Routledge) were published in 2024. He is currently working on a monograph on Micheal O’Siadhail (Routledge).
