Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day Files) [Paperback]

Joe Cleary (Author), Seamus Deane (Editor), Breandán Mac Suibhne (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Field Day Files | Publication Date: May 11, 2007

Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it has managed to do since it began to modernize and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is in reality aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with de Valera s Ireland in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world? These are some of the questions addressed in OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Edna O Brien, and comments too on what he terms the neo-naturalism of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'At last, the truth!' is the feeling the reader has after reading Joe Cleary's monumental new book. OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE is a comparative, materialist account of the emergence of modern Irish culture, mainly writing, mainly in the 20th century. Telling us what our century was really like, it paints a startlingly unfamiliar picture of a familiar corpus of writers and titles. Instead of looking at Irish letters from the inside, as it were, Cleary mobilises a breadth of reading in world literature, literary theory and economic history, to give an objective, bird's-eye literary view of the Irish 20th century. The result is an unsentimental account which knocks down most of the master narratives of Irish literary history. Most literary histories of Ireland have taken it as a given that the national narrative the struggle for independence, the foundation of the State, social and economic liberalisation is also the context of the national cultural narrative; that the story of national cultural production is a subset of the national story as a whole. ... Although the commonplace critical rhetoric surrounding contemporary Irish writing is that we are in a time of great vibrancy and innovation, Cleary wonders why our writers still devote their energies to 'slaying the shrivelled dragons of de Valera's Ireland' instead of engaging critically and imaginatively with the realities of the present. Luckily for Irish studies, however, in Cleary we have one writer who happens to do just that. He is ready to acknowledge and analyse works of talent and importance, but he himself has no investment in any idea or ideal of Ireland, in national identity or in national pride or shame; he is interested in the realities, not the myths, of society and culture. His book, which contains extraordinary essays on Irish film, the Marian apparitions and the Pogues, is erudite, forceful and fearless. Quite simply, it now feels impossible to understand modern Irish culture without it. --Barry McCrea in THE IRISH TIMES, 14 July 2007

About the Author

JOE CLEARY lectures in English in the National Univrsity of Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002) and co-editor (with Claire Connolly) of the The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005).

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Field Day Publications; 2nd edition (May 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0946755353
• ISBN-13: 978-0946755356
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,970,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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