The Distance of Irish Modernism

Book excerpt: The Distance of Irish Modernism interrogates the paradox through which Irish modernist fictions have become containers for national and transnational histories while such texts are often oblique and perverse in terms of their times and geographies. John Greaney explores this paradox to launch a metacritical study of the modes of inquiry used to define Irish modernism in the 21st century. Focused on works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Flann O'Brien and Kate O'Brien, this book analyses how and if the complex representational strategies of modernist fictions provide a window on historical events and realities. Greaney deploys close reading, formal analysis, narratology and philosophical accounts of literature alongside historicist and materialist approaches, as well as postcolonial and world literature paradigms, to examine how modernist texts engage the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Emphasizing the proximities and the distances between modernist aesthetic practice and the history of modernity in Ireland and beyond, this book enables a new model for narrating Irish modernism.