This Guide surveys existing criticism and theory, making clear the key critical debates, themes and issues surrounding a wide variety of Irish poets, playwrights and novelists. It relates Irish literature to debates surrounding issues such as national identity, modernity and the Revival period, armed struggle, gender, sexuality and post colonialism.

Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism, 65)

Literature & Fiction

Kelly, Aaron

British & Irish

Red Globe Press

Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism, 47)

<p>For the past 30 years, the so-called 'Troubles' thriller has been the dominant fictional mode for representing Northern Ireland, leading to the charge that the crudity of this popular genre appropriately reflects the social degradation of the North. Aaron Kelly challenges both these judgments, showing that the historical questions raised by setting a thriller in Northern Ireland disrupt the conventions of the crime novel and allow for a new understanding of both the genre and the country. Two essays on crime fiction by Walter Benjamin and Berthold Brecht appear here for the first time in English translation. By demonstrating the relevance of these theorists as well as other key European thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek to his interdisciplinary study of Irish culture and the crime novel, Kelly refutes the idea that Northern Ireland is a stagnate anomaly that has been bypassed by European history and remained impervious to cultural transformation. On the contrary, Kelly's examination of authors such as Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, Gerald Seymour, Colin Bateman, and Eoin McNamee shows that profound historical change and complexity have characterized both Northern Ireland and the thriller form.</p>

The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Studies in European Cultural Transition)

Routledge

History & Criticism

This study argues that James Kelman’s work should not be construed as a resigned capitulation to capitalist domination or to the fracture of a once unified working-class collective purpose. Politics are to be found not only in the content but also the form of Kelman’s work. The radical aspect of his style is that rather than pandering to a ready-made identity, he remains antagonistically non-identical to the prevailing logic of capitalism by contesting its supposedly shared worldview and modes of perception. Instead, Kelman’s fiction continually disputes the notion of consensus by revealing the voices of those excluded, those who are unaccounted for in that false consensus. His work uncovers a stark contradiction in the governing logic of our times: we are asked to accept that class has disappeared at the same time that we are told the system that causes it in the first place – capitalism – is inevitably here forever. Even the most alienated individuals in his stories remind us that isolation can transcend itself by returning us to the social conditions that are its cause. We find politics in Kelman’s aesthetics, as his work formally contests who has the right to feel, to think, to speak.

James Kelman: Politics and Aesthetics (Studies in the History and Culture of Scotland)

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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