Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987 – 2007

This critical study is an authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last quarter century. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of the country’s most critically celebrated and internationally successful writers, including Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín. Harte’s discussion of these novels addresses centrally important themes in contemporary Irish society, including the inescapability of the past, the troubling legacies of cultural and psychic traumas, the tensions created by the shedding of predetermined gender roles, the re–evaluation of traditional family values and the re–imagining of rural and urban space during a period of far–reaching social, cultural and political change. Each novel is set in its social and compositional contexts and Harte focuses on the historical and cultural realities of which these works are both a product and a critique. Central to the book’s overall argument is the belief that fictional responses to contemporary Irish society have taken on a heightened sociological complexion in the work of the country’s leading novelists, each of whom seeks a language, a rhythm and a form to match the angular nature of a society in a state of constant self–examination.  

Liam Harte is Senior Lecturer in Irish and Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (2007), Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty–First Century (2007; edited with Yvonne Whelan) and Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (2000; edited with Michael Parker). His most recent book is the critically acclaimed The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 , which was published as a Palgrave Macmillan paperback in 2011.