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 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 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 Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.
Introduction
Christopher Cusack, Bridget English, and Matthew L. Reznicek
Section I: Parental Corpses
Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Bodies: Maternal Corpses and the Irish Modernist Novel
Bridget English
Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction and the Remains of Irish History
Christopher Cusack
'Puppeting It Back to Life': Corpses, Motherhood, and Authorship in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat
Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan
Section II: Revivalist, Modernist and Irish Corpses
The Corpse in Irish Folklore and Drama: Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge
Michael McAteer
‘She had never seen a dead person': Ageing, Death and Spiritual Growth in Kate O’Brien
Margaret O’Neill
James Joyce’s 'The Sisters': Modernism, Nationalism, and the Sexually Pathological Corpse
Lloyd Meadhbh Houston
The Ethics of Dust: The Speaking Cadaver in Modern and Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry
Daniela Theinová
Section III: Romantic Corpses
Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Adam Smith’s Imagined Corpses
Colleen English
Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths: Death and the State in The Wild Irish Girl
Matthew L. Reznicek
'Why do you bring your dead bodies littering here?': The Corpse and the Comic Gothic in Romantic-Era Irish Women’s Writing
Christina Morin
Section IV: Unquiet Remains
Corpses, Cadavers, and Unquiet Remains in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill and Ariel
José Lanters
The Politics of Life and Death: Representations of the Dead Fetus in Irish Political Life
Sinéad Kennedy
The 'Problem' of the Unbaptized Corpse: Mary Leland’s The Killeen
Mary M. Burke
Haunting the Troubles: The Missing Body in David Park’s The Truth Commissioner
Mindi McMann
Afterword
Joe Cleary
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