Since the 1980s, Ireland has gone through a profound social, demographic, and religious disruption, the impact of which has been seen across recent fiction from Irish writers. Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces this cultural shift and its impact by examining how modern novels have reckoned with a new conception of Irishness.Despite the heady mix of cultural and social destabilization, reform, and economic successes and challenges, this period of relentless di...

Irish crime fiction, long present on international bestseller lists, has been knocking on the door of the academy for a decade. With a wide range of scholars addressing some of the most essential Irish detective writing, Guilt Rules All confirms that this genre has arrived. The essays collected here connect their immediate subjects—contemporary Irish crime writers—to Irish culture, literature, and history. Anchored in both canonical and emerging themes, this collection draws on es...

This book examines the recent expansion of Ireland's literary tradition to include home-grown crime fiction. It surveys the wave of books that use genre structures to explore specifically Irish issues such as the Troubles and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, as well as Irish experiences of human trafficking, the supernatural, abortion, and civic corruption. These novels are as likely to address the national regulation of sexuality through institutions like the Magdalen Laundries as t...