This collection addresses a large gap in the current critical literature; its discussion of non-canonical topics is especially welcome. There are, of course, risks in approaching contemporary material: the bewildering array of writers on the scene means exclusions, and there is the extreme difficulty of second-guessing posterity as to how lasting the work one has chosen to discuss will be. Nevertheless the introduction is a bit tight-lipped when it comes to offering judgments, aesthetically or ideologically or both; the energy of the individual essays finds only curiously muted echoes here, which leaves the impression of a whole somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
The relations of art with ideology are always and rightly a site of fascination and tension, and a tauter, even a more tendentious, exploration of these relations as they are conducted in Ireland now would have greatly enriched the discussion. The editors are right to insist on the centrality of Partition to Irish culture, and on the importance of discussing texts from both sides of the Border. Moreover they note the rapid social change, the contesting and dissolution of fixed identities, the enunciation of transgressive and borderline positions, evident in contemporary Irish life and writing, though this discussion is rather cursory. They also announce a determination to foster specifically literary discussions, not to let the texts be received as "repositories of ideological correctness and error".
But what, if anything, unifies writers who differ sharply in terms of form, theme, and perhaps ideology? Do these fictions differentiate themselves from contemporary novels elsewhere, preferably several elsewheres? How many of the cultural products of contemporary Ireland really are post-nationalist, how many post-national? A more extended and more theorised discussion would have strengthened the enterprise as a whole.
The essays themselves are richer and more various than I can indicate here. The title, indeed the whole project, predisposes the reader towards art as representation of something, a view scarcely avoidable in the case of narrative. Joseph McMinn's essay is an exception in supporting John Banville's rearguard defence of the aesthetic as a category, delicately playing off the author's own persona against those of his mandarin protagonists and nimbly, if not convincingly, resisting the charge of misogyny. Gerry Smyth's account of Dublin representations in 1990s novels is intelligently open about its theoretical influences in Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and the new geography.
Given this honourably pessimistic background, Smyth's conclusion is rather upbeat about post-modernity - suggesting that Philip Casey's "fabulist" characters may become "individuals rather than subjects, citizens rather than characters in their own necessary fictions". George O'Brien ranges back to earlier periods in exploring "the aesthetics of exile". Discussing Brian Moore and John McGahern, Siobhan Holland provides a highly able reflection on the subtle work of resistance to the dominant voices of Irish pieties, especially Mariolatry; she deploys her theoretical resources (Judith Butler and performativity) compellingly. In its confident position of critique, this piece sits well with Ann Owens Weekes' well-historicised account of mother-figurations from Mary Lavin to Clare Boylan.
Christine St Peter on incest narratives and Antoinette Quinn on lesbian fiction convincingly develop contiguous strands of critique. Comparing "pathographies of the Republic" in Colm Toibin and Patrick McCabe, Tom Herron perceptively differentiates between McCabe's floridly unredeemed world and the sense of possibility Toibin stages amid the radical erosion of the constricting past. Richard Haslam brilliantly situates Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man and Bernard McLaverty's Cal in the Irish sensationalist tradition, eloquently offering an accompanying moral interrogation of such representations. In an essay well grounded in an understanding of the politics of form, Richard Kirkland discerns a reiteration of "bourgeois redemptions" in Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson. Altogether, the collection offers tough-minded and informative individual analyses, which should instigate further worthwhile theoretical and critical work on Irish fiction.
Patricia Coughlan is Associate Professor in the English Department at NUI, Cork