Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak(New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)

This Open access book is a collection of essays and offers an in-depth analysis of silence as an aesthetic practice and a textual strategy which paradoxically speaks of the unspoken nature of many inconvenient hidden truths of Irish society in the work of contemporary fiction writers. The study acknowledges Ireland's history of damaging silences and considers its legacies, but it also underscores how silence can serve as a valuable, even productive, means of expression. From a wide range of critical perspectives, the individual essays address, among other issues, the conspiracies of silence in Catholic Ireland, the silenced structural oppression of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the recovery of silenced stories/voices of the past and their examination in the present, as well as millennial disaffection and the silencing of vulnerability in today's neoliberal Ireland. The book 's attention to silence provides a rich vocabulary for understandingwhat unfolds in the quiet interstices of Irish writing from recent decades. This study also invokes the past to understand the present and, thus, demonstrates the continuities and discontinuities that define how silence operates in Irish culture.Grant FFI2017-84619-P AEI, ERDF, EU (INTRUTHS "Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction") Funded by the Spanish Research Agency AEI http: //dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund ERDF "A Way of Making Europe"

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: Silences that Speak.- Chapter 2: Conspicuously Silent: The excesses of Religion and Medicine in Emma Donoghue’s historical novels The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars.- Chapter 3: “To Pick up the unsaid, and perhaps unknown, wishes”: Reimagining the “True Stories” of the Past in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky.-  Chapter 4: “He’s been wanting to say that for a long time”: Varieties of Silence in Colm Tóibín’s Fiction.- Chapter 5: The Irish Short Story and the Aesthetics of Silence.- Chapter 6: Infinite Spaces: Kevin Barry’s Lives of Quiet Desperation.- Chapter 7: The Silencing of Speranza.- Chapter 8: “A self-interested silence”: Silences Identified and Broken in Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1967).- Chapter 9: Silence in Donal Ryan’s Fiction.- Chapter 10: “Sure, aren’t the church doing their best?” Breaking Consensual Silence in Emer Martin’s The Cruelty Men.- Chapter 11: Unspeakable Injuries and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People.

About the Author :
M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Vigo, Spain. She is the author of a monograph on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and sits on the Editorial Board of European Joyce Studies. Her research on silence and vulnerability in contemporary Irish fiction has been funded by the Spanish MCIN, AEI and ERDF. She is the co-editor of Atlantic Communities: Translation, Mobility, Hospitality (2023) and the editor of Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing (2023) José Carregal-Romero lectures at the University of Huelva, Spain. His research focuses on the intersections between gender and sexuality in contemporary Irish literature, with a keen interest in silence and vulnerability. He is the co-editor of Revolutionary Ireland, 1916-2016: Historical Facts & Social Transformations Re-Assessed (2020) and the author of Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction (2021).