The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism

Book excerpt: Redefines Irish modernism as resistance to religious, sociopolitical and aesthetic orthodoxies Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism presents a fresh perspective on received understandings of Irish modernism. The introduction draws connections between modernism in the arts and modernism as a resistant, liberal, relativist movement within the Catholic Church that was gathering momentum in the same period. In religion as in culture, resistance to orthodoxy has persisted, and for this reason this companion explores modernist heresies - cultural, aesthetic, critical, epistemological - that stretch back to the late nineteenth-century and forward to present day. Contributors widen the temporal, conceptual, generic, and geographical definitions of Irish modernism by investigating crosscurrents between literary form and cultural transformation through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book enriches the canon of Irish modernism by recovering lesser-known works by both neglected and canonical writers, especially women poets and novelists. Maud Ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. Siân White is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. Vicki Mahaffey is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.