Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime reveals the primitive sublime as an overlooked aspect of modern Irish literature as central to Ireland’s artistic production and the wider global cultural production of postcolonial literature. A concern for and anxiety about the primitive persists within modern Irish culture. The “otherness” within and beyond Ireland’s borders offers writers, from the Celtic Revival through independence and partition to post-9/11, a seductive call through which to negotiate Irish identity. Ultimately, the disquieting awe of the primitive sublime is not simply a momentary recognition of Ireland’s primitive indigenous history but a repeated rhetorical gesture that beckons a transcendent elation brought about by the recognition of the troubled, ritualistic and sacrificial Irish past to reveal a fundamental aspect of the capacity to negotiate identity, viewed through another but intimately reflective of the self, within the long emerging twentieth-century Irish nation.
Chapter One: Introduction: Modern Ireland and the Primitive Sublime
Chapter Two: Performing the Primitive Sublime: The Celtic Revival and Irish Indigeneity
Chapter Three: James Joyce and the Primitive Sublime: From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
Chapter Four: Mid-century Malaise and Desublimation in Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Kate O’Brien, and Edna O’Brien
Chapter Five: The Living Dead: The Late Century Resurgence of the Primitive Sublime in Works by Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Brian Friel
Chapter Six: Primitive Sublime Terror: Writing New York after 9/11 in Joseph O’Neill, Colum McCann, and Colm Tóibín
Biography
Maria McGarrity is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She has been published in journals including the James Joyce Quarterly, Ariel: a Review of International English Literature, CLA Journal, and The Journal of West Indian Literature. She has published two monographs, Washed by the Gulf Stream: the Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (Delaware, 2008) and Allusions in Omeros: Notes and a Guide for Derek Walcott’s Masterpiece (Florida, 2015) and two co-edited collections, Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive (Palgrave, 2009) and Caribbean Irish Connections (University of the West Indies Press, 2015).
