Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction

Since the 2008 economic crisis, Irish fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective, highlighting the effects of a financialized worldview on human agency and responsibility. Broken Irelands examines how grammatical asymmetries and sentence fragments reflect a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and personal responsibility.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 30 October 2022
Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Since the 2008 economic crisis, Ireland's national narrative has been relentlessly optimistic, but fiction has provided a more nuanced perspective from both established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish novels of the post-crash era, focusing on the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. He argues that these traits diminish human agency, blur questions of responsibility, and emphasize emotion over rationality, reflecting and responding to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.

Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. He unpacks how formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

McGlynn's analysis demonstrates the power of fiction to capture the complexities of the post-crash era and to challenge the dominant narratives that shape our understanding of the world. His work highlights the importance of literature in providing a space for exploring the human experience and in challenging the assumptions that underlie our economic and political systems.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780815637868