Book contents
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Times
- Part II Spaces
- Part III Forms of Experience
- Chapter 11 The Irish Realist Novel
- Chapter 12 Faith, Secularism, and Sacred Institutions
- Chapter 13 Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture
- Chapter 14 Violence, Trauma, Recovery
- Chapter 15 Modes of Witnessing and Ireland’s Institutional History
- Coda: Edna O’Brien and Eimear McBride
- Part IV Practices, Institutions, and Audiences
- Index
Chapter 13 - Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture
from Part III - Forms of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Times
- Part II Spaces
- Part III Forms of Experience
- Chapter 11 The Irish Realist Novel
- Chapter 12 Faith, Secularism, and Sacred Institutions
- Chapter 13 Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture
- Chapter 14 Violence, Trauma, Recovery
- Chapter 15 Modes of Witnessing and Ireland’s Institutional History
- Coda: Edna O’Brien and Eimear McBride
- Part IV Practices, Institutions, and Audiences
- Index
Summary
Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.
Keywords
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- Information
- Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020 , pp. 246 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020