The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature

From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge’s sodden corpses and Joyce’s dead, to Nuala Ní 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 centrepoint 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.

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, where he co-coordinates the Certificate for Arts and Humanities in Medicine. He has published widely on Irish literature from the long nineteenth century. He currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.