Routledge Studies in Irish Literature
About the Book Series
Routledge Studies in Irish Literature offers a range of theoretical perspectives, focusing in greater part on texts from the 20th and 21st centuries, and on a multi-racial, multi-cultural contemporary Irish society. This series makes full use of a range of contemporary theoretical perceptions, including deconstructive, psychoanalytic, ecocritical, translational, gender/feminist, cultural materialist, postmodern, new materialist, queer theoretical and presentist observations, offering genuinely fresh insights into Irish writing. Questioning issues of the canon, high and popular cultures and the traditionally historical orientations of Irish studies, this series uses theory to liberate new meanings in terms of Irish writing, society and culture, and to show how such writing has been, and continues to be, an agent of change in that culture.
Working-Class Women in Irish Literature and Theatre: Emerging from the Silence
1st Edition
Edited
By Clara Mallon, Salomé Paul
July 25, 2025
Working-Class Women in Irish Literature and Theatre critically engages with works of theatre both by and about working-class women, historically and presently. Addressing professional and community theatre productions, from both textual and performative perspectives, this volume focuses on works of...
Tom Murphy’s Theatre of Everyday Space
1st Edition
By Moonyoung Hong
May 09, 2025
By the time of his death in 2018, Tom Murphy was widely recognised as one of Ireland’s most important modern playwrights. Ireland’s experience of rapid modernisation, emigration, and globalisation is vividly captured in his plays, challenging generic notions of space, place, and the nation. In ...
Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly
1st Edition
By Eugene O'Brien
May 05, 2025
Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll Kelly offers a thorough examination of narrative devices, satirical modes, cultural context and humour in Howard’s texts. The volume argues that his academic critical neglect is due to a classic bifurcation in Irish Studies between high and popular ...
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel: Order, Form, and Creative Un-Doing
1st Edition
By Ian Tan
May 05, 2025
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation ...
John McGahern: Ways of Looking
1st Edition
By John Singleton
April 13, 2025
John McGahern (1934–2006) believed that fiction could act as a window on the world. Such windows, however, frame our fields of vision, alter and shape our perspectives. Far from being static, the artist’s perspective must continually evolve. This book provides a literary analysis of John McGahern’s...
Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction: Magnitudes of Telling
1st Edition
By Paul Delaney
March 27, 2025
This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the ...
Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study
1st Edition
By David McKinney
December 27, 2024
This volume considers Samuel Beckett’s fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009–2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett’...
Irish Theatre: Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities
1st Edition
By Eamonn Jordan
December 18, 2024
This book on modern and contemporary Irish theatre traces how social, cultural and economic capital are circulated in order to demonstrate complex and often contradictory outlooks on equality/inequality. Individual chapters analyse property ownership and inheritance; wealth acquisition; employment ...
Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking
1st Edition
Edited
By Ian Hickey, Ellen Howley
October 08, 2024
Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking examines Seamus Heaney’s poetic engagement with myth from his earliest work to the posthumous publication of Aeneid Book VI. The essays explore the ways in which Heaney creates his own mythic outlook through multiple mythic lenses. They reveal how Heaney adopts a ...
Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey
1st Edition
By Edward J. O’Shea
August 26, 2024
Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some 40 years that Seamus Heaney spent in the United States as a teacher, lecturer, friend, and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit. It is anchored by ...
The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Tradition, Society and Modernity
1st Edition
By Madalina Armie
August 26, 2024
Winner of the European Society for the Study of English Book Award 2024 In the mid-1990s, Ireland was experiencing the "best of times". The Celtic Tiger seemed to instil in the national consciousness that poverty was a problem of the past. The impressive economic performance ensured that the ...
Trauma, Memory and Silence of the Irish Woman in Contemporary Literature: Wounds of the Body and the Soul
1st Edition
Edited
By Madalina Armie, Veronica Membrive
August 26, 2024
This volume studies the manifestations of female trauma through the exploration of multiple wounds, inflicted on both body and mind (Caruth 1996, 3) and the soul of Irish women from Northern Ireland and the Republic within a contemporary context, and in literary works written at the turn of the ...