The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature
Will be published approx. on 28. February 2026
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-1-83624-483-7 (ISBN)
Description
From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge's sodden corpses and Joyce's dead, to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centre-point with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts.
Taking Irish literature's obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.
Taking Irish literature's obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 163 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-83624-483-7 (9781836244837)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Christopher Cusack (Radboud University) has published widely on Irish and Irish-diasporic literature. His monograph The Great Famine in Irish and North American Fiction, 1892-1921 is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. Bridget English (University of Illinois at Chicago) is the author of Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel and a co-editor of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism. Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He has published widely on British and Irish romantic literature, and particularly on the intersection of health and illness in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing.
Content
1. Introduction
Christopher Cusack, Bridget English, and Matthew Reznicek
The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature
II. Reframing the Corpse
2. Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Sympathetic Corpses
Colleen English
3. 'Why do you bring your dead bodies littering here?': The Corpse and the Comic Gothic in Romantic-Era Irish Women's Writing
Christina Morin
4. Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths: Death and the State in The Wild Irish Girl
Matthew L. Reznicek
III. Revitalizing the Corpse
5. The Corpse in Irish Folklore and Drama: Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge
Michael McAteer
6. The Ethics of Dust: The Speaking Cadaver in Modern and Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry
Daniela Theinova
7. 'She had never seen a dead person': Corpses and Spiritual Transformation in Kate O'Brien
Margaret O'Neill
8. James Joyce's 'The Sisters': Irish Modernism and the Sexually Pathological Corpse
Lloyd Meadhbh Houston
IV. Familial Corpses
9. Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Bodies: Maternal Corpses and Septic Irish Modernism
Bridget English
10. Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction and the Remains of Irish History
Christopher Cusack
11. 'Puppeting It Back to Life': Corpses, Motherhood, and Authorship in Doireann Ni Ghriofa's A Ghost in the Throat
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
V. Unquiet Remains
12. Corpses, Cadavers, and Unquiet Remains in Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill and Ariel
Jose Lanters
13. Antigone's Daughters: Gender, Reproduction, and the Politics of the Dead
Sinead Kennedy
14. The 'Problem' of the Unbaptized Corpse: Mary Leland's The Killeen
Mary M. Burke
15. Haunting the Troubles: The Missing Body in David Park's The Truth Commissioner
Mindi McMann
16. Afterword
Joe Cleary
Christopher Cusack, Bridget English, and Matthew Reznicek
The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature
II. Reframing the Corpse
2. Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Sympathetic Corpses
Colleen English
3. 'Why do you bring your dead bodies littering here?': The Corpse and the Comic Gothic in Romantic-Era Irish Women's Writing
Christina Morin
4. Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths: Death and the State in The Wild Irish Girl
Matthew L. Reznicek
III. Revitalizing the Corpse
5. The Corpse in Irish Folklore and Drama: Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge
Michael McAteer
6. The Ethics of Dust: The Speaking Cadaver in Modern and Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry
Daniela Theinova
7. 'She had never seen a dead person': Corpses and Spiritual Transformation in Kate O'Brien
Margaret O'Neill
8. James Joyce's 'The Sisters': Irish Modernism and the Sexually Pathological Corpse
Lloyd Meadhbh Houston
IV. Familial Corpses
9. Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Bodies: Maternal Corpses and Septic Irish Modernism
Bridget English
10. Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction and the Remains of Irish History
Christopher Cusack
11. 'Puppeting It Back to Life': Corpses, Motherhood, and Authorship in Doireann Ni Ghriofa's A Ghost in the Throat
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
V. Unquiet Remains
12. Corpses, Cadavers, and Unquiet Remains in Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill and Ariel
Jose Lanters
13. Antigone's Daughters: Gender, Reproduction, and the Politics of the Dead
Sinead Kennedy
14. The 'Problem' of the Unbaptized Corpse: Mary Leland's The Killeen
Mary M. Burke
15. Haunting the Troubles: The Missing Body in David Park's The Truth Commissioner
Mindi McMann
16. Afterword
Joe Cleary