Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film

Marisol Morales-Ladrón is Senior Lecturer at the University of Alcalá, where she teaches Irish and English literature. She is the author of Breve introducción a la literatura comparada (1999) and Las poéticas de James Joyce y Luis Martín-Santos (2005). She also edited Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies (2007) and coedited Global Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts (2011). She has served as Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI) and as a board member of AEDEI and the Spanish Society for Comparative and General Literature (SELGyC).

«All in all, Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film provides a thorough overview of how the family –as an institution and metaphor for the Irish Republic and Irishness– has more often than not been portrayed as dysfunctional –thus revealing how, in fact, the discourse sustaining the ideal Irish family as a construct was a constraining force and therefore contested, at least artistically, in various ways. Due to the scope of the literary and filmic texts explored, the volume offers an overwhelming amount of information on the narrative and films produced in the last four decades. From this perspective, it could even be considered as a critical anthology of the literary and filmic production in Ireland from the 1980s to the present.»(María Isabel Seguro Gómez, miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 52/2015)

• Contents: Marisol Morales-Ladrón/Inés Praga/Asier Altuna-García de Salazar/Juan F. Elices/Rosa González-Casademont: Introduction: Home, Family and Dysfunction in the Narrative and Filmic Discourses of Ireland – Marisol Morales-Ladrón: Portraits of Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Women’s Narratives: Confined to the Cell, Lost to Memory – Inés Praga: Home Revisited: Family (Re)Constructions in Contemporary Irish Autobiographical Writing – Asier Altuna-García de Salazar: Family and Dysfunction in Ireland Represented in Fiction Through the Multicultural and Intercultural Prisms – Juan F. Elices: Familiar Dysfunctionalities in Contemporary Irish Satirical Literature – Rosa González-Casademont: Representation of Family Tropes and Discourses in Contemporary Irish-Themed Cinema – Asier Altuna-García de Salazar: From Escaping to Facing Dysfunction: An Interview with Emer Martin – Rosa González-Casademont: «There is no point in making local stories that are not universally true»: An Interview with Jim Sheridan – Rosa González-Casademont: «Ireland is a tough one when it comes to filming»: An Interview with Kirsten Sheridan.