At the time of his death in 1964, Sean O’Casey left a substantial body of disparate writings. His poetry, journalism, short stories, diaries, and his history of the Irish Citizen Army have received scant scholarly attention, but give us important clues about his literary development and his debt to other writers. This chapter examines some of these diverse writings to show how O’Casey experimented with a number of different forms. It also shows how O’Casey remained committed to writing in different genres throughout his life, and the chapter reveals some of the literary touchstones that would inform his non-theatrical writings.

Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935) was written during an exceptionally difficult period in Beckett’s life during which he suffered two bereavements in rapid succession, resulting in the deterioration of his health. The collection, which has its antecedents in poetry ranging from Ovid to Joyce, focuses on the successive metamorphoses of the embodied self, including birth, illness, ageing, death, and decay. Through close readings of a number of the poems, the chapter analyses the ways in which Beckett’s early poetry can be understood as a type of anti-poetry that resists traditional conceptions of the aesthetic as beautiful, as conceptual, and as combining the sensory with the spiritual. The language and imagery of Echo’s Bones, with its refusal of metaphor and its lexical and syntactical resistance to interpretation, also resists the metaphysical consolations of poetry.

Literature is the space in which the inadmissible – including the otherwise largely unacceptable or unspeakable question of suicide – can be addressed. Focusing on the prominence of representations of suicide in modernist literature, this chapter addresses the question in the work of Woolf, Joyce, and Beckett. It argues that in Samuel Beckett’s major works, suicide appears prominently, and yet in the margins, while the works that thematise suicide are relatively minor in the Beckett canon. By distancing the act from the affective intensity with which it is usually associated, Beckett’s prolific references to suicide present the act as both unexceptional and lacking in pathos. This view of suicide can be aligned with the late-nineteenth-century views of the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who considers suicide, ‘just a necessary incident from time to time’ in the course of the subject’s evolutions.

Realism and modernism are often taken to be opposed literary movements, typically defined by an emphasis on content and form, respectively. When we look closely at the practices of the modernists, however, we see that they remain invested in many of the same concerns as realists – sociality, community, sentiment – even if these appear in new forms. Beginning with Henry James’s lifelong, and contradictory, engagement with George Eliot, this chapter then compares James Joyce’s Ulysses to Middlemarch, demonstrating their shared commitment to the ability of the aesthetic to both reveal and shape our common social world.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

Station Island is a key text in coming to an understanding of the changing nature of Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism. For this reason, it is the subject of Chapter Four, alongside Heaney’s translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Heavily informed by his reading of Dante, it comes at the mid-point of Heaney’s own life and is the most forthright engagement with the political and religious pieties of his childhood upbringing. I attend to a close reading of the twelve-sequence poem ‘Station Island’, the title poem of the collection, and read it in the context of its draft forms and what Heaney says elsewhere about the poem. I conclude by arguing that rather than resolving Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism, Station Island appears to reinforce it. However, as an act of spiritual catharsis, it clears the way for the more visionary and airy poems of subsequent collections. His translation of the Sweeney poem allows Heaney to ventriloquise, from a safe vantage point, his own poetic sense in the person of King Sweeney, who acts as a bridge between the two collections.

This chapter discusses the reception of Hopkins in the 1920s and 1930s and his influence on modernism and twentieth-century criticism. It proposes Hopkins’s importance to the emphasis on difficulty and ambiguity in modernist critcism, as well as on relations between sound and sense. It also observes Hopkins’s significance for theories of rhythm, metre, and diction in modernist poetry.

Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

Academic scholarship on James Joyce’s work has shown over the past three decades a shift toward the local, and has highlighted the deep embeddedness of Joyce’s work in Ireland, especially Dublin. This may be viewed as a move away from earlier “universalist” or “globalizing” readings, where Joyce’s stature as a modernist, his formal experimentation, and his anticipation of later conceptions of literary textuality occupied centerstage. How do we think Joyce’s location in our present? What in Joyce can travel, in space and in time? This chapter focuses on the persistent preoccupation in Joyce’s work – notably Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – with recollection, especially with modes of remembrance that extend beyond individuals to encompass multiple levels of the past. It examines the afterlife of this concern in India by discussing Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (English, 1935), Devanoora Mahadeva’s Kusumabale (Kannada, 1988), and Anand’s Vyasanum Vighneswaranum (Malayalam, 1996). Through a consideration of forms of narration emerging from contexts where the relationship between instituted archives and literary citation is rendered difficult, the chapter delineates “destitute” modes of recollection foregrounded in strands of Indian modernism.

This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This essay examines the changing fortunes of the university in Ireland through a history of the English department. With literary references to Joyce and Yeats, it describes colonial and postcolonial encounters in the classroom.

Oxford classicist, lover of Renaissance art, Pater might seem to belong in a different atmospheric universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the Paris of the 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s work has given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. This chapter examines Pater’s practice of ‘second-hand’ writing in ‘Style’ – in particular his borrowings from Flaubert and Maupassant – in the light of intertextual theory in comparison with the extreme citational practices of Flaubert and Joyce. Highlighting significant similarities and differences between their treatment of sources, it brings into focus the specificity of Pater’s drive to style the second-hand.

The Introduction opens with a close reading of information proliferation and human–machine interfaces in James Joyce’s Ulysses to establish these themes as central to the book’s exploration of the emergent early-twentieth-century phenomenon Love labels “cybernetic thinking.” She traces biographical and intellectual connections between T. S. Eliot and Norbert Wiener (the “father of cybernetics”), provides an overview of the field of cybernetics and its definitional challenges, and proposes that a reconsideration of cybernetics’s cultural lineage – as evident in experimental modernist texts – will contribute a valuable new dimension to our understanding of both modernism and cybernetics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s notion of the “cybernetic fold” is redeployed to describe the rich openness to data-processing-possibility that emerges during these decades, when high-speed computing is imaginable but not yet technologically realized. After contextualizing the project within existing media- and modernist-studies conversations, the Introduction culminates with a close reading of Wiener’s cybernetic approach to information that links his perspective on technical innovation to modernist aesthetics.

Easily overlooked desires and pleasures are also central to the project of Chapter 2, which argues that literary obscenity can be constituted by suggestion and desire, rather than explicit sex. Beginning with the Ulysses trials, obscenity law has conflated obscenity with pornography and opposed it to literary value. By this logic, the category of obscenity contains only those works that employ direct and explicit depiction of certain body parts and actions to incite a prurient response, excluding work that mingles the erotic with the aesthetic, or operates via indirect means. Going against this scholarly and popular convention, this chapter recuperates the category of the obscene by centering appetite, rather than explicitness. Turning to the twin appetites, “Hunger and Lust,” that give the chapter its title, it locates obscenity in writing that allows transgressive or excessive desire to dictate its form, inviting readerly complicity and arousing readers’ own appetites. Juxtaposing texts by James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Rabindranath Tagore, this account of obscenity reminds us of literature’s power to unsettle our understanding of desire itself.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

Across his career, as the previous work of this chapter’s author and that of other critics such as Andrzej Duszenko, M. Keith Booker, David Ben-Merre, Jeffrey Drouin, and Ruben Borg has shown, James Joyce frequently included reflections on a changing landscape of time in response to Einstein’s ‘new physics’. However, while there has been important recent research touching on this topic, including the author’s wider survey of work in modernist studies, no critic has yet fully centred the watch as a technological index of Joyce’s attitudes to time. In this essay, three specific examples of Joyce’s concern with watch technology are looked at, located in the relationship of timepiece and character; firstly, Bertha’s wristwatch in Joyce’s play Exiles (1918), followed by Bloom’s pocket watch in Ulysses (1922) and, finally, HCE’s timepiece in Finnegans Wake. Each of these watches evidence Joyce’s complex feelings about connections between embodiment, sexuality, and technology.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

Chapter 2 reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the Victorian industrial novel. Deeply invested in social determination, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, nevertheless, offer sympathy as the way out of the class struggles it deplores. At the same time, sympathy is precisely one of those impurities inciting desire that Stephen explicitly disavows at the end of Portrait of the Artist. Sympathy, though, remains fundamental to Ulysses, intertwined with its reflections on an autonomy that is equal parts aesthetic and political. Sympathy is seen here to be a form of social coercion limiting Stephen’s artistic autonomy even as its absence is part of what prevents the Irish from uniting against their common enemies and achieving political autonomy. Contrasting Bloom with Stephen, I read the Blooms as a model of community that refuses to see autonomy and sympathy as opposed values, a form of family that counters the patriarchal family of the national imaginary.