Mehr lesen
This volume examines how post-Celtic Tiger Irish literature responds to overlapping economic and environmental crises through an innovative blending of realism, speculative, and gothic modes. Focusing on seven texts published between 2004 and 2022, it introduces Uncanny Realism-a critical framework that explores how fractured, hybrid narratives destabilize familiar worldviews, drawing out latent histories and spectral traces of crisis. These works blur boundaries between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, domestic and foreign - capturing a pervasive sense of dislocation and recurrence.
Grouped by spatial context-rural, domestic, and urban-the selected texts trace how literature registers extractivism, precarity, and the erosion of social and material certainties across distinct Irish geographies. By emphasizing Ireland's semi-peripheral position within the global capitalist system, the book reveals how these fictions not only narrate local transformation but are also deeply embedded in planetary dynamics.
The Uncanny as a Method challenges familiar binaries such as realism versus the speculative, national versus global, and center versus periphery. It offers a new way to read literature in times of systemic rupture, contributing to Irish studies, ecocriticism, and world literature by reimagining how fiction can articulate the strange familiarities of global crisis.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Part I
Chapter one: Uncanny Realism, towards a definition
Part Two
Chapter Two: Uncanny Realism and the Irish Post-Crash Novel
Chapter Three: Fjords, bogs, brains, fields, bohereens and motorways: Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack, Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from the Irish Dystopia by Tomas Mac Sìmòn and The Fjord of Killary by Kevin Barry
Chapter Four: Haunted houses, monster houses, show houses and ghost estates: Nothing on Earth by Conor O'Callaghan, and The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy.
Chapter Five: Infrastructures, urbanization and otherworldly presences in The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy, and Solar Bones by Mike McCormack.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Beatrice Masi earned her PhD in World Literature and Anglophone Studies at the University of Bologna and worked as an assistant lecturer on MA courses in Irish Studies at the University of Bologna.
