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Often hailed as a 'national genre', the short story has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. Critical appreciation of the Irish short story, however, has laboured for too long under the normative conception of it as a realist form, used to depict quintessential truths about Ireland and Irish identity. This definition fails to do justice to the richness and variety of short stories published in Ireland since the 1850s. This collection aims to open up the critical debate on the Irish short story to the many different concerns, influences and innovations by which it has been formed. The essays gathered here consider the diverse national and international influences on the Irish short story and investigate its genealogy. They recover the short fiction of writers neglected in previous literary histories and highlight unexpected strands in the work of established writers. They scrutinize established traditions and use cutting-edge critical frameworks to discern new trends. Taken together, the essays contribute to a more encompassing and enabling view of the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.
List of contents
Contents: Elke D'hoker: Complicating the Irish Short Story - Marguérite Corporaal: 'Let any one try to picture what it is': The Dynamics of the Irish Short Story and the Mediation of Famine Trauma, 1850-1865 - Gaïd Girard: From Tale to Short Story: The Motif of the Stolen Child in Le Fanu's Short Fiction - Heidi Hansson: Emily Lawless and History as Story - Debbie Brouckmans: Bridging Tradition and Modernity: George Moore's Short Story Cycle The Untilled Field - Michael O'Sullivan: Loneliness and the Submerged Population: Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice and Joyce's 'The Dead' - Brian Ó Conchubhair: What Happened to Literary Modernism in the Irish-Language Short Story? - Hilary Lennon: Frank O'Connor's 1920s Cultural Criticism and the Poetic Realist Short Story - Johanna Marquardt: Oral Tradition with a Twist: Flann O'Brien's Short Fiction and Nation Building - Veronica Bala: Early Readings, Early Writings: Samuel Beckett's Student Library and His First Short Stories - Eibhear Walshe: The Ghostly Fields of North Cork: Ireland in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen - Theresa Wray: Breaking New Ground and Making Patterns: Mary Lavin's First Short Story Collection Tales from Bective Bridge - Heather Ingman: The Female Writer in Short Stories by Irish Women - Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt: Claire Keegan's New Rural Ireland: Torching the Thatched Cottage - Anne Fogarty: A World of Strangers? Cosmopolitanism in the Contemporary Irish Short Story.
About the author
Elke D'hoker is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Leuven, where she is also co-director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies. She is the author of Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville (2004) and co-editor of Narrative Unreliability (2008), Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives (2011) and Mary Lavin (2013).
Stephanie Eggermont is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven. In her doctoral dissertation, she investigated the contribution of women writers to the birth of the modern short story in Britain. Her fields of research include British short fiction, gender studies and fin-de-siècle journalism.
