At the Ebb Tide

This chapter maps the diverse coastal cultures of Irish literature through the periodicals of the mid-century, moving from The Bell, to Atlantis, the Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Ireland, and others. When Seán O’Faoláin began The Bell in 1940 he faced severe challenges of war, partition and economic distress, which had fragmented his audience and stunted his resources. It begins with a description of O’Faoláin’s childhood upbringing in the port city of Cork and follows the diverse ways in which the sea, and its fringes, shaped literature and criticism in a period of rapid cultural transition. Populated by a diverse cast of writers, artists and adventurers including Elizabeth Bowen, Peadar O’Donnell, Robert Gibbings, and Claire McAllister, this chapter winds from the Lee to the Seine by way of the Wye in its mapping of mid-century archipelagic cultures.

Obliquities

This chapter explores how obliquity functions as both a narrative mode and a literary style in the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. It contends that, for Bowen, confrontations with history and modernity are best handled indirectly and tactfully, to the point that obliquity becomes a signature of her short story style. The early part of the chapter outlines Bowen’s poetics of the short story. Her thinking on the short story is compared with that of her compatriots, Seán O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, whose stories informed her discussion of ‘national imprint’ in a class on short fiction that she taught at Vassar College in 1960. The latter part of the chapter analyses how Bowen develops an aesthetics of oblique representation of Irish history in her own fiction, with particular reference to ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘A Love Story 1939’, two stories set during the Second World War.

Arrows in Flight

This chapter explores why the three twentieth-century writers who arguably did most to establish the short story as the quintessential Irish literary form—Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin—fell short in the novel form. All three writers excelled in the shorter format, devoting meticulous care to their craft and revising and reshaping their stories many times, sometimes even after publication. Furthermore, O’Connor and O’Faoláin wrote influential critical studies of the modern short story, and Lavin was a perceptive arbiter of its aesthetic value and potential. As novelists, however, all three published works that, in the view of critics and also the writers themselves, were failures. The chapter critically examines the reasons that underpin such judgements.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five distinguished scholars of Irish fiction. Collectively, they provide accessible and incisive assessments of the breadth and achievement of Ireland’s modern novelists and short story writers, whose contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to the country’s small size. The volume brings an impressive variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary-historical contexts. The Handbook’s coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the nature and function of the Irish Gothic mode; nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, Seán O’Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women’s fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.

Garnett, Edward (1868–1937)

Although he wrote little of artistic merit himself, Edward Garnett was very influential on British modernism. Like Ezra Pound, Garnett had an uncanny ear for good literature. As a manuscript reader for publishers, he was instrumental in the discovery or fostering of many important writers during this period, among them Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, W. H. Hudson, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, Henry Green and T. E. Lawrence.