Irish Fiction after Joyce

ECTS allocation:                  10
Teaching Faculty:                 Prof Eve Patten
Contact:                                1 x 2 hours/week in Hilary term

This course will survey the Irish novel over three decades after 1939, with particular focus on themes of individual resistance-- sexual, political, religious or cultural—to community and nation. Our aim is to read the fiction which emerged after Joycean modernism (and at times, in negotiation with it), in order to establish critical perspectives on issues of Irish counter-revivalism, inter-modernism, realism, experimentalism and genre. In addition to reading the set texts we will consider critical readings of mid twentieth-century Irish fiction by various commentators, and discuss the contribution of writers such as Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, Mary Lavin, Molly Keane (M.J.Farrell), Francis Stuart, Anthony West, Maura Laverty, Maurice Leitch, Michael McLaverty, Forrest Reid, Patrick Kavanagh and Benedict Kiely. Additional bibliography will be provided during the course.

1. Introduction: Irish fiction after Joyce
2. Flann O'Brien, At Swim Two Birds (1939)
3. Kate O'Brien, The Land of Spices (1941)
4. Fiction and the 1950s: critical texts
5. Sam Hanna Bell, December Bride (1951)
6. Elizabeth Bowen, A World of Love (1955)
7. Reading week
8 J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955)
9. Fiction and the 1960s: critical texts
10. Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls (1960)
11. Brian Moore, The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965)
12. Conclusions and essay consultation

Background critical bibliography
Brown, Terence, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922--1985 (1985)
Cahalan, James, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (1988)
Cleary, Joe and Connolly, Claire (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005)
Fallon, Brian, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930—1960 (1998)
Hand, Derek, A History of the Irish Novel (2011)
Harte, Liam (ed), Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (2005)
Foster, John Wilson (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006)
Pierce, David (ed), Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (2000)