Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture

Michaela Schrage-Früh, Tony Tracy, Michaela Schrage-Früh, Tony Tracy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000588309
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men's embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O'Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Table
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture
• PART I Drama
• 2 Taking the “Black Stick” Ageing Husbands and Fathers in the Plays of J. M. Synge and Teresa Deevy
• 3 “Are All the Monks Old Men?” Ageing and the Male Monastic Community in Brian Friel’s The Enemy Within
• 4 Father Ireland on Stage Representations of Social Change and Ageing Masculinities in Crisis
• PART II Poetry
• 5 Poetics at the Limit Embodiment, Masculinities, and Ageing in Samuel Beckett’s Early Poetry Collection Echo’s Bones
• 6 Masculinity, Ageing, and Midlife Crisis in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Paul Durcan
• 7 Not Sailing to Byzantium Aged Masculinities and Latour’s Matters of Concern in the Late Works of Irish Male Poets
• PART III Fiction
• 8 “That the Youth May Throw Us Aside” Fatherhood, Ageing Masculinities, and the Politics of Insecurity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction
• 9 Stuck in the Old Times A Male-character Analysis on Three Irish Novels Through Corpus Stylistics
• 10 Uncanny Reflections Older Widowers in John Banville’s The Sea, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture and Anne Griffin’s When All Is Said
• 11 “Caught Suddenly by the Land Shifting” Ageing Masculinity and Rural Ireland in Recent Irish Short Fiction
• 12 “A Bridge to Nowhere” Arrested Development, Trauma, Liminality, and the Ageing Irish Exile in Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break
• 13 “Shades of Masculinity” Midlife and Caring Masculinity in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
• 14 Colm Tóibín and Henry James Portrait of an Ageing Master
• PART IV Visual Culture
• 15 Seán Keating’s Ireland The Land of Old Men
• 16 Ageing Masculinities and Irish Traditional Music on Screen
• 17 Changing the Picture Older Men’s Responses to Media Representations of Ageing in an Irish Context
• Index