Contemporary Irish Fiction

LIAM HARTE is Senior Lecturer in Irish Studies at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill. He has published articles on contemporary Irish fiction and poetry and is the co-author of Drawing Conclusions: A Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations, 1798-1998 and Ireland Since 1690: A Concise History. MICHAEL PARKER is Principal Lecturer in English, University of Central Lancaster. He is the author of a bestselling study, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet , the editor of The Hurt World: Short Stories of the Troubles and the co-editor of Postcolonial Literatures.

'This timely volume addresses the substantial and growing body of work by contemporary Irish novelists, and helps us to understand the forces and energies that drive their achievement and success. These stimulating essays offer fresh insights into the preoccupations of some of Ireland's most gifted writers, as they try to tell the story of the inner life of a society that is changing at a tremendous pace, while also remaining strange, alluring and deadly.' - Robert Welch, Professor of English, University of Ulster, editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature '...the collection offers tough-minded and informative individual analyses, which should investigate further worthwhile theoretical work on Irish fiction.' - Patricia Coughlan, The Irish Times 'This book is a remarkably alert and up-to-date series of critiques of recent Irish fiction...It projects an Ireland, both North and South, which is changing rapidly in mores and assumptions...What is most surprising and heartening is how the communities in these novels are, on the whole, portrayed as having the capacity for rapid change. The criticisms break new ground by not simply confining themselves to the evils of the traditional in the face of a brave new world, but showing how the new world and the old manage to negotiate a shared territory...[The book] applies to fiction techniques which up to now have commonly been confined to poetry. Its appearance is a watershed in the criticism of the busy world of the modern Irish novel.' - Bernard O' Donoghue, Fellow in English, Wadham College, Oxford

• Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction; L.Harte & M.Parker The Right to the City: Re-presentations of Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction; G.Smyth The Aesthetics of Exile; G.O'Brien Re-citing the Rosary: Women, Catholicism and Agency in Brian Moore's Cold Heaven and John McGahern's Amongst Women; S.Holland Versions of Banville: Versions of Modernism; J.McMinn Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction; A.O.Weekes Petrifying Time: Incest Narratives from Contemporary Ireland; C.St Peter New Noise from the Woodshed: The Novels of Emma Donoghue; A.Quinn ContamiNation: Patrick McCabe and Colm Toibin's Pathologies of the Republic; T.Herron 'The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over': Visualizing the 'Troubles'; R.Haslam Bourgeois Redemptions: The Fictions of Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson; R.Kirkland Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction; L.Harte & M.Parker Bibliography Index