Overview

From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge’s sodden corpses and Joyce’s dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts. Taking Irish literature’s obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.

Full Product Details

Author:   Christopher Cusack ,  Bridget English ,  Matthew L. Reznicek
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
ISBN:  

9781836244837

ISBN 10:   1836244835
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   03 February 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Christopher Cusack, Bridget English, and Matthew L. Reznicek Section I: Parental Corpses Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Bodies: Maternal Corpses and the Irish Modernist Novel Bridget English Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction and the Remains of Irish History Christopher Cusack 'Puppeting It Back to Life': Corpses, Motherhood, and Authorship in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan Section II: Revivalist, Modernist and Irish Corpses The Corpse in Irish Folklore and Drama: Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge Michael McAteer ‘She had never seen a dead person': Ageing, Death and Spiritual Growth in Kate O’Brien Margaret O’Neill James Joyce’s 'The Sisters': Modernism, Nationalism, and the Sexually Pathological Corpse Lloyd Meadhbh Houston The Ethics of Dust: The Speaking Cadaver in Modern and Contemporary Irish-Language Poetry Daniela Theinová Section III: Romantic Corpses Elegies in Irish Country Churchyards: James Orr, Thomas Dermody, and Adam Smith’s Imagined Corpses Colleen English Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths: Death and the State in The Wild Irish Girl Matthew L. Reznicek 'Why do you bring your dead bodies littering here?': The Corpse and the Comic Gothic in Romantic-Era Irish Women’s Writing Christina Morin Section IV: Unquiet Remains Corpses, Cadavers, and Unquiet Remains in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill and Ariel José Lanters The Politics of Life and Death: Representations of the Dead Fetus in Irish Political Life Sinéad Kennedy The 'Problem' of the Unbaptized Corpse: Mary Leland’s The Killeen May M. Burke Haunting the Troubles: The Missing Body in David Park’s The Truth Commissioner Mindi McMann

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Author Information

Christopher Cusack (Radboud University) has published widely on Irish and Irish-diasporic literature. His monograph The Great Famine in Irish and North American Fiction, 1892-1921 is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. Bridget English (University of Illinois at Chicago) is the author of Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel and a co-editor of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism. Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he co-coordinates the Certificate for Arts and Humanities in Medicine. He has published widely on Irish literature from the long nineteenth century. He currently serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine.

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