About this ebook
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.
