BOOK NEWS: Reading Irish women's writing through a queer, postcolonial lens

Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399547468

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html

A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing

• Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
• Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
• Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.

BOOK NEWS: Rediscovering misplaced queer history in Irish literature and film

Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature

By Patrick R. Mullen

Syracuse UP, 2026.

ISBN: 9780815612131

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/9432/queer-possessions/

Too often, fleeting moments rooted in queer experience have appeared in popular fiction, only to be little remarked upon, often noted only as a sign of continuing neoliberal social advances. In Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature, Patrick Mullen makes the case for a more personal analysis of these moments, finding ways for readers to create new meaning and explore closer readings of key texts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Queer Possessions is divided between close readings of modern Irish novels and films and creative readings of the same texts, to give readers the tools to engage more deeply with the process of analysis and criticism. In the first mode, Mullen examines how modern Irish literature has frequently featured comedy to represent queer sexuality and economic crisis in the twenty-first century. This analysis allows for the second mode, in which the text helps readers to assume a critical role, encouraging their own creative readings of texts and imagining more of the works.

Equal parts critical and playful, Queer Possessions works to rediscover misplaced queer history, encourage new forms of experiencing text, and empower readers to create new interpretations and works.

"What sets this book apart is its innovative approach to critical and creative reading. It doesn’t just offer theoretical insight, but delivers practical strategies for engaging with texts in imaginative, politically attuned, and meaningful ways, which is now more crucial than ever in the classroom. Queer Possessions is invaluable resource for scholars, educators, and students seeking new ways to approach and interpret literature."—Páraic Kerrigan, author of Reeling in the Queers: Tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ Past

Patrick R. Mullen is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History.

JML 47.3 (Spring 2024) is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature 47.3 (Spring 2024), with a special guest-edited cluster “Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel,” and a cluster on “Ireland’s Modernists,” is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52819.

Content includes:

Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Doug Battersby

Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Kirsty Martin

D.H. Lawrence and Shyness

Doug Battersby

Elizabeth Bowen’s Equivocal Modernism

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Heart

Rick de Villiers

True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness 

Ulrika Maude

“Other kinds of emotions”: Ishiguro’s Late-Modernist Affect 

Derek Attridge

Joycean Form, Emotion, and Contemporary Modernism: Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Ireland’s Modernists

Katherine Franco

Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in “Circe” 

FREE

Karl O’Hanlon

Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Danielle N. Gilman

Elizabeth Bowen’s Critical “Scrap Screen” 

Jivitesh Vashisht

“He will now think he hears her”: Indirect Perception and the Return to Proust in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio

Mantra Mukim

Timbral Poetics: Samuel Beckett and the Impossible Voice

BOOK NEWS: How writers contributed to peace in Northern Ireland

Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland

BY MARILYNN RICHTARIK

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192886408

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/getting-to-good-friday-9780192886408?cc=us&lang=en&#

Getting to Good Friday intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland's divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on decades of reading, researching, and teaching Northern Irish literature and talking and corresponding with Northern Irish writers, Marilynn Richtarik describes literary reactions and contributions to the peace process during the fifteen years preceding the Agreement and in the immediate post-conflict era. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators' ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, "In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across." 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Interpreting selected literary works by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature-that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to "say" about a given subject-can enrich readers' historical understanding. Through Richtarik's engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself.

• Enhances our understanding of what the peace process achieved and how literary writers contributed to it
• Employs an innovative interdisciplinary approach that smoothly integrates literary analysis and narrative history to illuminate historical phenomena
• Includes analysis informed by the author's personal conversations and correspondence with literary writers, as well as by examination of their unpublished papers
• Offers readers cutting-edge scholarship in a readable format

"Professor Richtarik's book applies her deep knowledge of the psychological and political terrain of Northern Ireland to this empathetic study of a cohort of remarkably talented and closely linked writers. It brings new and arresting insights to the troubled history of the province, its contested cultural paradigms, the pressures which led to the peace process, and the tensions which continue to threaten that achievement." -- R. F. Foster, emeritus professor of Irish History, University of Oxford, and emeritus professor of Irish History and Literature, Queen Mary University of London

"Getting to Good Friday, a profound meditation on historical and political events and the cultural response of writers, confirms that it is by writing that a refinement in character is possible—and that the best self is the self that writes. In Reading in the Dark, published two years before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, Seamus Deane presciently identified the problem of the aftermath: the problem of telling or not telling. Marilynn Richtarik describes the drive towards Good Friday through riveting storytelling, but her detailed attention to creative writers' texts is her finest achievement." -- Anne Devlin, author of After Easter and The Apparitions

"Getting to Good Friday is an important book at a critical time. In arguments about Brexit and the protocol it is sometimes remarked that the people who defend the 1998 agreement never read it ... Getting to Good Friday is a welcome bridge between these sundered generations, made of the words that join them, conditional as they are." -- Nicolas Allen, The Irish Times

Marilynn Richtarik is professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches British, Irish, and world literature. She was educated at Harvard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in American History and Literature, and at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Her previous books include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (2012), and an edition of Stewart Parker's novel Hopdance (2017). She spent the first half of 2017 researching and teaching at Queen's University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar.

BOOK NEWS: Subversion of convention in Irish noir fiction

Finders: Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction

BY ANJILI BABBAR

Syracuse UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780815611578

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5582/finders/

Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of “finder”—a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form—Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.

"Babbar's rigorous, serious, and insightful Finders is the most comprehensive study into the exciting phenomenon of Northern Irish crime fiction. A must-read for literary scholars and the casual fan of the most explosive sub genre of Celtic Noir."—Adrian McKinty, author of The Chain

"This is an astonishing achievement. . . . Historically rich and geographically expansive, Babbar’s study, in smooth, erudite prose, casts an astute eye over the complexities and distinctiveness of Irish crime fiction."—Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast

"Babbar provides a wonderfully comprehensive survey of the major authors in the contemporary Irish noir field. She accomplishes a minor miracle in synthesizing so many texts in an interesting, provocative, and engaging way."—Andrew Kincaid, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

"Babbar’s hopeful readings broaden the critical lens in distinctive and valuable ways by exploring Irish crime fiction’s acute insights about the thorniest matters of community faith and self."—Brian Cliff, coeditor of Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction

Anjili Babbar is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County. She has published on topics ranging from Irish crime fiction to representations of Irish folklore in popular culture.

BOOK NEWS: The effects of financialized discourse on post-2008 Irish fiction

Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction

BY MARY M. MCGLYNN

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637868

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5168/broken-irelands/

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

"McGlynn identifies fascinating patterns in contemporary Irish fiction and persuasively connects these to the cultural logics of the time period.…This is a complex and challenging endeavor and McGlynn does it with a sophistication that is dizzyingly brilliant."—Claire Bracken, Union College

"Broken Irelands offers a carefully calibrated analysis of capital, class, and narrative form in the post-Celtic Tiger Irish novel. Deftly combining literary criticism, theories of neoliberalism, and studies of late capitalist modernity, McGlynn contends, convincingly, that it is at the level of formal brokenness, rhetorical technique, and syntactical and stylistic strangeness and distress that something like the politics of contemporary Irish fiction discloses itself. Written with brio, critical affection for its subject matter, and intelligent insight, Broken Irelands sets an impressively high bar for future reflection on these topics."—Joe Cleary, Yale University

Mary M. McGlynn is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies.

Book News: Poetic justice in modern Ireland

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland

BY ADAM HANNA 

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637615

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/4769/poetry-politics-and-the-law-in-modern-ireland/

A compelling look at the role of legal developments and controversies in shaping modern Irish poetry.

Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this monograph is the first in the growing field of law and literature to focus exclusively on modern Ireland. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Poetry from the time of independence onwardhas been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally had strong expectations that poets offer a dissenting counter-discourse to official sources of law. On the other hand, poets have more recently expressed skepticism about the ethics of speaking for others and about the adequacy of art in performing a public role. Hanna’s fascinating study illuminates the poetry that arises from these antithetical modern conditions.

"I was hooked from the word go . . . . this pioneering book develops a strong case for the engagement of poetry and law in Ireland. It opens up in a genuinely original and intellectually nuanced way the resonant overlap between legal, constitutional and ethical concerns in Irish poetry since Yeats."—Hugh Haughton, Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literatures at the University of York

"Poetry, Politics, and Law in Modern Ireland is a major achievement. Combining the rigours of quite brilliant close readings with an attention to the various legal and extra-legal contexts that help shape the work of Ireland's modern poets, Hanna reveals the jurisprudential unconscious of the literary and the cultural after-life of the law."—Eugene McNulty, Dublin City University

"This is a book about poetic justice itself, about how the acknowledged legislations of poetry act as conscience and arbitrator for the failings of laws—and their inevitable repeal. Hanna's scholarship has an ambition of breadth and reach that means it should be read by lawyers, historians and political scientists—but above all it should be read by poets and their readers, as an argument for the seriousness of Irish poetic engagement with the laws of the country, South and North."—Matthew Campbell, University of York

Adam Hanna is a lecturer in the English Department at University College Cork. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space and the coeditor of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary and Law and Literature: The Irish Case.

Book News: the gramophone's influence in Irish literature

 Ireland’s Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

BY ZAN CAMMACK

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97977-0

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55431/

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The specificity with which this book, as quoted above, documents the arrival of the Edison’s invention is characteristic of its good use of historical sources to evoke the impact of the phonograph and later the gramophone in Ireland. Another strength is the alignment of such historical details to the machine’s technical realities; this is a book that uses diagrams, graphs, and tables to considerable critical effect. [...] In its marrying of careful textual analysis to historical detail and conceptual sophistication this lucid and engagingly written study should have a significant impact on future considerations of the intersection between technology and memory in Irish writing.

--Tom Walker, Estudios Irlandeses

Zan Cammack is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University. Her research primarily focuses on studies of material culture in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. She has published on Elizabeth Bowen, G.B. Shaw, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Austen (the latter two publications are manifestations of deep fangirling of said authors). Her current work is situated at the intersection of material culture and gender studies, including work on female performance studies in Samuel Beckett’s plays and flapper fashion and British politics.

Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN

Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm

The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games, and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.

Book News: The Irish Celt figure in modern literature

 Against the Despotism of Fact: Modernism, Capitalism, and the Irish Celt

BY T.J. BOYNTON 

SUNY Press, 2021

Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8181-4

Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8180-7

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-7009-against-the-despotism-of-fact.aspx

Emerging at a moment of escalating colonial conflict between England and Ireland, the figure of the Irish Celt enjoyed a long and varied career in both English and Irish literature from the late Victorian era to World War II. While this figure assumes many forms and functions, T. J. Boynton argues that he is consistently cast as inherently resistant to capitalism. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Beginning with an innovative reassessment of Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, from which the book also takes its title, Against the Despotism of Fact offers new readings of major works by writers such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. In their writing, Boynton argues, the Irish Celt served as a transnational vehicle of modernist experimentation geared toward interrogating the imperial, social, and pop-cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity. Making a significant contribution to Irish studies, modernist studies, and postcolonial studies, Against the Despotism of Fact draws attention to not only the prevalence but also the critical potential of this fraught figure.

“Against the Despotism of Fact is an exciting contribution to Irish literary studies, to the study of modernist literature and culture, to the study of postcolonial, materialist, and globalist theory, and it is also a major intervention in the study of a range of important writers, from J. M. Synge to Samuel Beckett. This is an exciting work, building on existing scholarship and research, that will be widely discussed, and cited for years to come.” 

— Enda Duffy, author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism

T. J. Boynton is assistant professor of English at Wichita State University.

Book News: 50% off Irish Studies sale from Syracuse UP

Until July 1, 2021, Syracuse University Press is offering 50% off all its Irish Studies titles when you use the discount code 05Summer.  

Their full catalog of Irish Studies titles is available HERE 

Book News: Dublin's post-independence theatre scene

 

Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940

BY RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN 

Syracuse UP, January 2021

Paper ISBN: 9780815636434

Hardcover ISBN: 9780815636250

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/3470/avant-garde-nationalism-at-the-dublin-gate-theatre-1928-1940/

A new generation of Irish playwrights set out to establish Dublin as a modern European capital by staging radical productions at the Dublin Gate Theatre.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.

"Offers an invaluable tool for advancing knowledge in the fields of drama, performance, and Irish studies with its close attention to the underexamined institution of the Gate Theatre. . . . This book will make a significant and long-lasting impact in Irish studies, theatre studies, and accounts of mid-century modernism."  —Paige Reynolds, author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle

"For many years, the accepted story of Irish theatre was that the Abbey was the writers’ theatre, and its rival, the Gate, was primarily a producing house. Making use of newly available archival sources, Ruud van den Beuken turns the old story on its head, and in so doing forces us to rethink Irish theatre. This book demands our attention."  —Christopher Morash, Trinity College Dublin

Ruud van den Beuken is assistant professor of English literature at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He was awarded the 2015 Irish Society for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize.