The Uncanny as a Method in Contemporary Irish Literature

Beatrice Masi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040628003
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

This volume examines how post-Celtic Tiger Irish literature responds to overlapping economic and environmental crises through an innovative blending of realism, speculative, and gothic modes. Focusing on seven texts published between 2004 and 2022, it introduces Uncanny Realism: a critical framework that explores how fractured, hybrid narratives destabilize familiar worldviews, drawing out latent histories and spectral signs of systemic crisis. These works blur boundaries between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the present and the past, the here and there, capturing a pervasive sense of dislocation and recurrence. Grouped by spatial context (rural, domestic, and urban) the selected texts trace how literature registers extractivism, precarity, and the erosion of social and material certainties across distinct Irish geographies. By emphasizing Ireland's semi-peripheral position within the global capitalist system, the book reveals how these fictions not only narrate local transformation but are also deeply embedded in both global and planetary dynamics. The Uncanny as a Method in Contemporary Irish Literature challenges familiar binaries such as realism versus the speculative, national versus global, center versus periphery, and social and economic constructs versus planetary dynamics. It offers a new way to read literature in times of systemic rupture, contributing to Irish studies, ecocriticism, and world literature by reimagining how fiction can articulate the strange familiarities of global crisis.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction Towards a definition of Uncanny Realism
• 2. Uncanny Realism and the Irish post-crash novel
• 3. Rural narratives Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack, “The Fjord of Killary” by Kevin Barry, and Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from the Irish Dystopia by Tomás Mac Síomóin
• 4. Domestic narratives Nothing on Earth by Conor O'Callaghan and “The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac” by Louise Kennedy
• 5. Infrastructural narratives The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy, and Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
• Conclusion
• Index