Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020: Volume 6

A volume of early critical intervention into the features of contemporary Irish and Northern Irish authors, writing, and cultural practice.

This is among the very first collections for graduates and researchers to track Irish and Northern Irish writing across the twentieth century's long turn, and the remarkable transitions that accompanied it. It revisits major writers and texts, providing path-making accounts of emergent figures through a range of perspectives.Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020 elucidates the central features of Irish literature during the twentieth century's long turn, covering its significant trends and formations, reassessing its major writers and texts, and providing path-making accounts of its emergent figures. Over the past forty years, life in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland has been transformed by new material conditions in each polity and by ideological shifts in the way people understand themselves and their relation to the world. Amid these remarkable changes, culture on both sides of the border has emerged as a global phenomenon, one that both reflects and intervenes in rapidly changing contemporary conditions. This volume accounts for broad patterns of literary and cultural production in this period and demonstrates the value of Irish contemporary literature within anglophone and European traditions and as a body of work that has kept its eye trained on the particularities of the island and its inhabitants.