Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, this book provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland.Scheible dissects the ways that 'the woman-as-symbol' remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of s...

The classical Bildungsroman charted an idealized path of human development: the harmonizing of individual desires and societal norms in the formation of a well-rounded liberal subject. But what happens when this Enlightenment blueprint for self-cultivation runs up against the particularities of a colonial society riven by nationalism, revolution, and uneven modernization?The Irish Bildungsroman provides the first comprehensive study of how this quintessentially bourgeois a...

A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writerTeaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce scholars share approaches that go beyond the traditional university lecture hall to...

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work ...

Teaching John McGahern's "The Dark" provides an indispensable companion to the classic Irish novel. With an introduction aimed at first-time readers and four critical essays, this edition guides readers through the novel’s famously controversial history. While The Darkwas initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, scholars now demonstrate that McGahern’s novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-cen...

This collection of essays is a critical reexamination of Joyce’s famed book of short stories, Dubliners. Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book. Challenging these canonical notions about mobility, paralysis, identity, and gender in Joyce’...