Christopher Cusack – författare

From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge’s sodden corpses and Joyce’s dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts.Taking Irish literature’s obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.

The 150th anniversary of Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1990s generated a significant increase in scholarship on the history of the crisis and its social and cultural aftermath. Two decades later, interest in the Irish Famine – both scholarly and popular – has soared once again. A key event in Irish cultural memory, the crisis still crops up regularly in public discourse within Ireland and among the Irish diaspora. This volume, containing essays by distinguished scholars such as Peter Gray, Margaret Kelleher and Chris Morash, offers new perspectives on the Famine and its contexts. Addressing the challenges and opportunities for Irish Famine studies today, the book presents a stimulating dialogue between a wide range of disciplinary approaches to the Famine and its legacies.