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The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature -

The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature

Buch | Hardcover
304 Seiten
2026
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
9781836244837 (ISBN)
CHF 209,45 inkl. MwSt
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From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge’s sodden corpses and Joyce’s dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centre-point with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts.

Taking Irish literature’s obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.

Christopher Cusack (Radboud University) has published widely on Irish and Irish-diasporic literature. His monograph The Great Famine in Irish and North American Fiction, 1892-1921 is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. Bridget English (University of Illinois at Chicago) is the author of Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel and a co-editor of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism. Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He has published widely on British and Irish romantic literature, and particularly on the intersection of health and illness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing.

1. Introduction

Christopher Cusack, Bridget English, and Matthew Reznicek

The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature

II. Reframing the Corpse

2. Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Sympathetic Corpses

Colleen English

3. ‘Why do you bring your dead bodies littering here?’: The Corpse and the Comic Gothic in Romantic-Era Irish Women’s Writing

Christina Morin

4. Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths: Death and the State in The Wild Irish Girl

Matthew L. Reznicek

III. Revitalizing the Corpse

5. The Corpse in Irish Folklore and Drama: Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge

Michael McAteer

6. The Ethics of Dust: The Speaking Cadaver in Modern and Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry

Daniela Theinová

7. ‘She had never seen a dead person’: Corpses and Spiritual Transformation in Kate O’Brien

Margaret O’Neill

8. James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’: Irish Modernism and the Sexually Pathological Corpse

Lloyd Meadhbh Houston

IV. Familial Corpses

9. Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Bodies: Maternal Corpses and Septic Irish Modernism

Bridget English

10. Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction and the Remains of Irish History

Christopher Cusack

11. ‘Puppeting It Back to Life’: Corpses, Motherhood, and Authorship in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat

Kathleen Costello-Sullivan

V. Unquiet Remains

12. Corpses, Cadavers, and Unquiet Remains in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill and Ariel

José Lanters

13. Antigone’s Daughters: Gender, Reproduction, and the Politics of the Dead

Sinéad Kennedy

14. The ‘Problem’ of the Unbaptized Corpse: Mary Leland’s The Killeen

Mary M. Burke

15. Haunting the Troubles: The Missing Body in David Park’s The Truth Commissioner

Mindi McMann

16. Afterword

Joe Cleary

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