Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modern ... More

Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.