Anne Enright

Description

Anne Enright is one of the most innovative and exciting writers in Ireland – and indeed, the world today – whose work encompasses a wide range of genres, themes, and interests. With her dark humor and wry tone, she displays a capability to be remarkably funny while engaging with serious subject matter and themes. The recognition for her novel, The Gathering, by the Man Booker judges in 2007, proves this to be a timely moment to critically explore her writing.

This is the first study of Anne Enright, in which leading scholars examine her work in relation to style; her situation in a postmodern and experimental tradition in Irish and non-Irish writing; and her engagement with culture and social change, tradition and modernity, memory, gender, and sexuality. The book also includes an extensive interview with Anne Enright and a comprehensive bibliography.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction – Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill
2. An Interview with Anne Enright, August 2009 – Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill
3. Distorting Mirrors and Unsettling Snapshots: Anne Enright’s Short Fiction – Elke D’hoker
4. Beyond Local Ireland in The Wig My Father Wore – Heidi Hansson
5. ‘Now the blood is in the room’: The Spectral Feminine in the Work of Anne Enright – Anne Mulhall
6. ‘Dreaming of upholstered breasts’, or, How to Find your Way Back Home: Dislocation in What Are You Like? – Susan Cahill
7. ‘Without a blink of her lovely eye’: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and Visionary Scepticism – Partricia Coughlan
8. ‘History is Only Biological’: History, Bodies and National Identity in The Gathering and ‘Switzerland’ – Kristen Ewins
9. Waking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright’s Narrators in Mourning ~ Gerardine Meaney
10. What am I like?: Writing the Body and the Self ~ Matthew Ryan
11. Anne Enright’s Machines: Modernity, Technology and Irish Culture ~ Claire Bracken
12. Relationships with ‘the Real’ in the Work of Anne Enright ~ Hedwig Schwall

About the Editors

Claire Bracken is Assistant Professor of Irish Literature and Culture at Union College, New York.

Susan Cahill is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Global Irish Institute, University College Dublin.