Writing from the Margins

The Irish short story tradition occupies a unique space in world literature. Rooted in an ancient oral storytelling culture, the Irish short story has underwent numerous transitions, from 19th century Anglo-Irish writers such as William Carleton through to the 20th century’s groundbreaking impact of George Moore’s The Untilled Field. George Moore’s work inspired the next generation of Irish Catholic writers such as Joyce, Frank O’Connor and Benedict Kiely, who foregrounded the backbone of the mainstream Irish short story literary canon. There is, however, another dimension to the short story tradition in Ireland that has always been overlooked. Led by Samuel Beckett, and including the work of Aidan Higgins and Tom Mac Intyre, this other marginalized tradition has had a consistently invisible presence in the Irish literary tradition. These three short story writers mark an alternative avant-garde movement in the culture of the modern Irish short story. The works of Beckett, Higgins and Mac Intyre share an aesthetics of disruption which is marked in different ways by the subversion of form and through narrative, linguistic and thematic deconstructive devices. There is currently a resurgent research interest in the Irish short story, and this book is the first to highlight an area of Irish short story writing which has been woefully neglected.