Book contents
- The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Revaluations of Irish Expatriate Fiction
- Chapter One After America
- Chapter Two Between Byzantium and Beijing
- Chapter Three Monstrous Modernity of the Global South
- Chapter Four Elusive Europes
- Conclusion The Weight of the World
- Notes
- Index
Chapter Three - Monstrous Modernity of the Global South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2021
- The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Revaluations of Irish Expatriate Fiction
- Chapter One After America
- Chapter Two Between Byzantium and Beijing
- Chapter Three Monstrous Modernity of the Global South
- Chapter Four Elusive Europes
- Conclusion The Weight of the World
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.
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- The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization , pp. 131 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021