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.

This chapter examines four novels published since the Irish economic crash and set in Dublin during the late boom and early bust years. Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011), Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015). Each of these novels details the effects of economic developments on the live, finances, and psyches of Irish citizens, while also exploring how a culture of accumulating indebtedness has altered the nature of contemporary Irish reality and the real ties that band society together. Reading these novels in the context of a recent turn in Irish Studies away from cultural concerns and toward a focus on Ireland’s “real economy,” I show how these novelists pay attention to the economy while not being afraid to explore world views, ideologies, desires, and feelings that serve to make it real.

In a youth-driven society such as Ireland, older adults may well find themselves marginalized by institutionalized ageism and figured as outsiders in the cultural imagination. Rather than static concepts of age, however, new patterns are emerging in post–Celtic Tiger Irish literature in its representations of aging. Read within the interdisciplinary framework of cultural gerontology, the narratives of aging explored in this chapter reveal recent changes among the middle-aged and older characters’ views on, as well as their place within, Irish society and culture. These works, spanning drama, poetry, and fiction, illuminate the complexities of later life, informed by declining health and experiences of loss, while at the same time highlighting generational interdependencies. Crucially, they avoid the nuclear family as a symbol on which to model the nation, urging readers to embrace new notions of the Irish family, ones that might adjust to accommodate and incorporate better the experiences of growing old.

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.