Bridget English

English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth– and twenty–first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland’s cultural and historical experience of death.

Combining key concepts from narrative theory—such as readers’ competing desires for a story and for closure—with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.

Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities is a thought-provoking and field-expanding intervention in Irish modernist studies and one which will prove hugely profitable to students and scholars alike. The collection’s inclusion of a variety of theoretical conceptions of the body and other media like comics offers perspectives that expand the field of Irish modernism.

This dissertation examines how the modern Irish novel negotiates shifting cultural conceptions of death and dying across the twentieth century. Analyzing a cross-section of important novels — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks and Anne Enright’s The Gathering — my study will argue that the Irish novel has long grappled with the meaning of life and death in a world where religious and secular conceptions of the nature of life and death have continually intersected and conflictually coexisted. Though sometimes viewed as a wholly secular form, the novel in the Irish context has struggled to reconcile Catholic views of life and death that stress the importance of a “good death” and the rewards of eternity with secular worldviews that stress the importance of personal fulfillment in this life and that see death as a final and absolute ending. The novel genre may be secular in its general tendency, but it is also...