This volume examines how post-Celtic Tiger Irish literature responds to overlapping economic and environmental crises through an innovative blending of realism, speculative, and gothic modes. Focusing on seven texts published between 2004 and 2022, it introduces Uncanny Realism: a critical framework that explores how fractured, hybrid narratives destabilize familiar worldviews, drawing out latent histories and spectral signs of systemic crisis. These works blur boundaries between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the present and the past, the here and there, capturing a pervasive sense of dislocation and recurrence. Grouped by spatial context (rural, domestic, and urban) the selected texts trace how literature registers extractivism, precarity, and the erosion of social and material certainties across distinct Irish geographies. By emphasizing Ireland’s semi-peripheral position within the global capitalist system, the book reveals how these fictions not only narrate local transformation but are also deeply embedded in both global and planetary dynamics. The Uncanny as a Method in Contemporary Irish Literature challenges familiar binaries such as realism versus the speculative, national versus global, center versus periphery, and social and economic constructs versus planetary dynamics. It offers a new way to read literature in times of systemic rupture, contributing to Irish studies, ecocriticism, and world literature by reimagining how fiction can articulate the strange familiarities of global crisis.
Table of Contents:
1 Introduction: Towards a Definition of Uncanny Realism
1.1 Uncanny Un-worlding
1.2 Uncanny Narratives in Un-Worlding Times
1.3 Uncanny Realism
2 Uncanny Realism and the Irish Post-Crash Novel
2.1 The Irish Celtic Tiger
2.2 Post-Crash Fiction: a realism-irrealism continuum
3 Rural narratives: Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack, Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from the Irish Dystopia by Tomas Mac Sìmòn and The Fjord of Killary by Kevin Barry
3.1 Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack
3.1.2 An anamorphic, fragmented, multi-scalar, uncanny structure
3.1.3 JJ O’Malley: a liminal figure beyond conceptual borders
3.1.4 JJ O’Malley: God and guinea pig
3.2 The Fjord of Killary by Kevin Barry
3.2.1 The end of what world?
3.2.2 The background is moving: the end of the world
3.2.3 A failed epiphany
3.3 Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from the Irish Dystopia by Tomás Mac Síomóin
3.3.1 Clashes of teleology and deep time
3.3.2 The bog as a temporal-spatial device
4. Domestic narratives: Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan, and The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy
4.1 Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan
4.1.1 The first scale of disappearance
4.1.2 The second scale of disappearance
4.2 The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy
4.2.1 A spectre in a haunted house
4.2.2 Re-signifying the haunting, breaching through the cul de sac
5. Infrastructural narratives: The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy, and Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
5.1 The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy
5.1.2 Historical recurrences
5.1.3 Tristam, the devil and the underworld
5.2 Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
5.2.1 A ghostly, uninterrupted monologue
5.2.2 Can a ghost undo the world?
Conclusion
About the Author :
Beatrice Masi earned her PhD in World Literature and Anglophone Studies at the University of Bologna and worked as an assistant lecturer on MA courses in Irish Studies at the University of Bologna and as a literary translator from English into Italian.
