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Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities ed. by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak (review)

2024; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 119; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2024.a916741

2222-4319

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities ed. by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak Lianghui Li Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities. Ed. by Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak. London: Bloomsbury. 2022. ix+ 268 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–3501–7736–9. This collection of essays expands the critical purview of Irish modernism by highlighting marginalized writers and fresh frameworks. Specifically, this project is conducted within the context of the new modernist studies, revealing a 'diversity of Irish modernist bodies, technologies, and ecologies', and exalting the local modernism, as opposed to the international modernism, in the pluralization of modernisms (p. 2). In the Introduction the editors, Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak, aim to further broaden the rubric of 'Irish modernism' beyond the 'politics, ideologies, and ethics of canon formation', and dichotomized terms concerning Irishness and Ireland itself, setting the tone for the collection both to interrogate the received canon of Irish modernism and to reconceive Irish modernism in the process of historicizing the studies (p. 4). The volume is divided into three parts. The first enriches the Irish modernist canon concerning race, genre, gender, and language. For instance, John Brannigan demonstrates Hannah Berman's indelible contribution to Irish modernism as an Irish Jewish writer and translator. In the same vein, Elke D'hoker studies Ethel Colburn Mayne's highly experimental short stories on women's life struggle. Lucy Collins examines the poems and careers of Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, and Rhoda Coghill. Collins explores these poets' close association with the modernist theme of melancholia. Beyond this, Maureen O'Connor explores death and the non-human in Elizabeth Bowen's works. Lastly, Eoin Byrne compares Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Samuel Beckett in terms of language and style to emphasize the modernist writings in Irish as a minority language. [End Page 147] In the second part, contributors draw attention to biopolitics in Irish literature, pushing the boundaries of Irish modernism. Barry Sheils takes a psychoanalytical approach to skin, particularly blushing, and examines the complex cultural situations that confronted Yeats, Burke, and Joyce and literary texts such as Ulysses and Beckett's 'First Love'. The relationship between Revivalism and Irish modernism is investigated in Seán Hewitt's study of queerness in the works of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, Eva Gore-Booth, etc. Similarly, it is a central question in Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston's research on the role that the discourse of medicine played in the riot instigated by Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. Informed by Freud's and Derrida's theories on death and sex, Katherine Ebury brings Joyce and Yeats into conversation with the 1916 generation of writers on the executions of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran. Additionally, Laura Lovejoy studies the complicated portrayals of prostitutes in Liam O'Flaherty's popular writings. Subsequently, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley explores the convergence of the Irish modernist writings of Joyce and Beckett, bardic tradition, and silent cinema. The third part of this volume challenges dichotomies between high and popular literature. Drawing on the rising conception of 'weakness', which celebrates uncertainty, incompleteness, and fluidity instead of closure and containment within the theorization and scope of modernism, Maebh Long argues that letters as a literary form facilitated a decentred and enriched network of Irish modernist writers. Jack Fennell argues that the anti-scientific sentiment in Irish modernism derives from a nationalistic desire to defend Gaelic culture against English discourse. Michael Connerty problematizes the high and low art forms, revealing the significance of the comic strips of Jack B. Yeats. Daniel Curran considers Thomas MacGreevy an Irish modernist war poet for his first-hand experience on the battlefields of the First World War and his depiction of the ekphrastic experience in verse. At the end of this part, Catherine Flynn examines Flann O'Brien's newspaper column, noting its relationship to his works of high literature and the ways this genre helped shape the Irish state. This book is essential for scholars specializing in Irish literature. It would be equally useful for researchers in the field of modernism because of its close alignment with new modernist studies and...