Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland

· Field Day Files Book 1 · Field Day Publications
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246
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About this ebook

Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in

the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth

century than it has managed to do since it began to ‘modernize’

and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish

modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems

gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative

and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with ‘de Valera’s

Ireland’ in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of

accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a

worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals

to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold

War world?

These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous

Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary

probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism

in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and

the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John

McGahern and Edna O’Brien, and comments too on what he

terms the ‘neo-naturalism’ of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and

Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of

the cultural achievement of the Pogues.

About the author

Joe Cleary is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002) and co-editor (with Claire Connolly) of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005). He was visiting professor of English at Yale until 2014. He teaches in the National University

of Ireland, Maynooth.

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