Light and the lens: streams of damaged consciousness in post-crash Irish modernist fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines the state of Irish literature since the 2008-9 financial crash. I contend that, whilst a supposedly mature Realism was the dominant mode of Irish writing during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years of economic boom, since the crash an identifiably Modernist literary movement has (re-)emerged. Examples of this re-emergent Modernism are Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), Anakana Schofield’s Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015), Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone (2015) and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016). I position these texts in relation to discourses of both Realism and Postmodernism, and to Irish High Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that they represent a dynamic extension of Modernist aesthetics, not merely a static recapitulation of Modernist convention. I argue that the terms Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism (and ‘Metamodernism’, a recent category in which I include Barry’s Beatlebone) more usefully denote literary techniques with a particular aesthetic/political relationship to the world, than fixed historical periods. I analyse these texts’ use of such Modernist techniques through a theoretical lens which draws upon debates concerning literary form in twentieth-century Marxism, Gramscian theories of hegemony (notably as developed by Raymond Williams), Marxist-influenced theorisation of Ireland and Irishness, and linguistic criticism which contrasts Modernist interrogation and fracture with Realist meta-language and closure. I examine both the narratological techniques which comprise these texts’ ‘Modernism’, and also the material circumstances of their publication, which has relied heavily on a small group of Arts Council-supported small presses and literary magazines. My thesis also draws on contemporary journalism, both with regard to the economic context of Celtic Tiger and post-crash Ireland and to the reception of my primary texts. The thesis ends with a ‘coda’, which treats the immediately post-crash rejuvenation of Irish Modernism as a closed (or closing) historical moment, and speculates whether Irish Modernist aesthetics will continue to innovate and interrogate (as suggested by Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018)), or whether this ‘Movement’ is already expiring, to be replaced by a socially liberal but formally conservative return to Realist aesthetics (as suggested by Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018)).