Based on readings of some of the leading literary voices in contemporary Irish writing, this book explores how these authors have engaged with the events of Ireland’s recent economic ‘boom’ and the demise of the Celtic Tiger period, and how they have portrayed the widespread and contrasting aftermaths. Drawing upon economic literary criticism, affect theory in relation to shame and guilt, and the philosophy of debt, this book offers an entirely original suit of perspectives on both established and emerging authors. Through analyses of the work of writers including Donal Ryan, Anne Haverty, Claire Kilroy, Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Justin Quinn, and Paul Murray, author Eóin Flannery illuminates their formal and thematic concerns.
Paying attention to generic and thematic differences, Flannery’s analyses touch upon issues such as: the politics of indebtedness; temporality and narrative form; the relevance of affect theory to understandings of Irish culture and society in an age of austerity; and the relationship between literary fiction and the mechanics of high finance. Insightful and original, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction provides a seminal intervention in trying to grasp the cultural context and the literature of the Celtic Tiger period and its wake.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Celtic Tiger identity parades in Chris Binchy’s Open-handed and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins
2. The Possibilities of Shame in Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood
3. Relative Values in Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December and The Spinning Heart
4. Bildung and Temporality in Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion
5. Debt, Guilt and Form in (post-)Celtic Tiger Ireland
6. Finance and fiction in Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past
7. Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Eóin Flannery lectures in the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He is the author of 4 books: Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History, and Environmental Justice (2016); Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption (2011); Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia (2009); and Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture (2006). His edited publications include: Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Literature, History and Imperialism (2007); Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (2009), and This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann (2012).
Review :
Eoin Flannery’s Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction is a compelling study of the intimate relations between finance and fiction in the wake of the Celtic Tiger. Readers will be truly indebted to this subtle and enlightening study for many years to come. It is pleasingly elegant and playfully entertaining, and it offers a startling account of the tangled co-existence of wealth creation and creative writing.
It is hard not to think that this period in our recent history warrants more attention. And in Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction, Eóin Flannery, offers a crucial intervention…This is a work of literary criticism before it is a work of social analysis and Flannery’s insights offer readers a renewed appreciation of the works under discussion.
Flannery’s consideration of the relationship between form and temporality in post-Celtic Tiger Irish fiction is very strong. He proposes that this implies all too easily an element of historic determinism to Celtic Tiger affluence in the first place, and then to the crash…Flannery’s work stands as an important contribution to what he flags as the growing field of ‘economic humanities’ in Irish studies and contemporary literary studies, providing a rich and detailed reading of twenty-first century Irish fiction, as well as the philosophical and political hinterlands informing it.
Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction offers a topical and theoretically astute exploration of the way the novel reflects upon the legacies of the era. [and] the convergence of finance narratives of risk, guilt, and indebtedness with narratives of moral responsibility are incisively explicated by Flannery. Flannery’s study exposes the distorted promises and the fractured temporalities of the fictions of the post-Celtic Tiger literary scene. Guilt, shame, confusion are the affects he traces across these texts, transmitted primarily via masculine experiences of disempowerment and doubt…this is, without doubt, an erudite and stimulating intervention in contemporary Irish Studies that will prompt further necessary discussions of the cultural mediations of and reactions to neoliberal capitalism in Irish society.
