Derek Hand

Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of ...

This chapter examines novelistic responses to the multifaceted changes that characterized life in Dublin during and after the Celtic Tiger era. The first part explores portrayals of changing personal, moral, and artistic value systems at a time when the forces of globalization were altering the city’s distinctive culture. This is followed by a consideration of the treatment of history in some recent Dublin-set novels, with particular focus on works that explore the interplay between previous eras and the present one, including the legacies of hidden trauma. In examining novelists’ attempts to identify what it is that defines Dubliners and their city in the era of globalization, the chapter finds that while the answers vary from novelist to novelist, all understand the city’s identity to be fluid and mobile, a complex amalgam of local and global elements that poses unsettling questions about the meaning and constitution of self and community.

very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The white May blossoms swooned into the open mouth of the grave" 6 [laughter]. Well I suppose we all begin by imitation. Before that I had only read detective stories and PG Wodehouse and the like, and here suddenly was something that was new to me, something about real life, as I was experiencing it myself, I thought it was something to emulate. So I began to write and my Aunt Sadie down the road had a huge black Remington typewriter and I ...

This chapter argues that the novel form is best suited to giving expression to the multifaceted Irish reality. Ireland, in the modern moment, is a place of incongruity and contradiction: it is at once a site of colonization and post-colonization, as well as simultaneously positioning itself as an integral part of a modern, globalized, economic union. The novel’s being bound to the immediate moment, while also aspiring toward the transcendence of immutable art, perfectly reflects an Irish mood caught between the violent actuality of war and a desire for mundane ordinariness. Indeed, it can be argued that the novel form offers a very human, and humane, lens through which to expose the hidden histories and anxieties of real people. Certainly the Irish novel has consistently done this from the seventeenth century onward, as it has charted the story of Ireland’s complex emergence into modernity.

Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of ...

Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's fiction is original and innovative, challenging many preconceptions of what'Irish'writing is and might be. Her first collection of short stories, Blood and Water (1988), displayed a variety of concerns with contemporary Irish life written from often startling perspectives. The best of these pieces demonstrate an anxious awareness of the difficulties not only with the'what'of stories but also with'how'they are being told. Such self-conscious concerns with the medium through which she is writing, with both language and form, ...

Roddy Doyle (1958-) is perhaps the single most successful novelist of this period, gaining an audience far beyond the environs of Dublin’s Northside where most of his writing is set. Along with the emergence of rock group U2, Doyle represents a brash generational shift, a confident certitude in his generation’s worth and ability. His literary focus is not exactly the urban world; rather it is the suburban world. Not however the suburbia of the middle-classes in their mock-Tudor houses with names offering imaginative vistas of lawns and downs. Doyle’s is a suburbia devoid of bourgeois fripperies and manners. The places of his writing are the numerous, anonymous satellite towns that have sprung up on the ever-expanding edges of the old city of Dublin. They are villages without a centre, or a past: there are no traditions of living other than the immediate codes of survival. These are displaced, disconnected communities: more examples of hidden Ireland.

What has become known as the Barrytown trilogy: The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), have become iconic in Irish culture. Centred on one family, the Rabbittes, Doyle makes reference to current events like the 1990 Soccer World Cup, and in dealing with the issues of teenage pregnancy and unemployment captures the mood of a nation requiring something light and entertaining amid the economic and cultural gloom of the late 1980s. Technically direct, with the emphasis on dialogue rather than description, there is little time for self-conscious reflection or a rendering of an interior life working through neuroses. In this some might suggest that Doyle is merely offering another version of the stereotype of the Irish person as public jester. Undermining such a reading, though, is the basic decency of the characters depicted and their biting wit which acts both as means of deflecting away any serious analysis of their lot and as a powerful weapon to put down those who might patronisingly position themselves in a zone of superiority. What is remarkable from the vantage point of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is how rapid was the dating of Doyle’s Dublin which was vanishing into a world of work, jobs, success and money even as it was being written about. Certainly, Doyle’s is a diagnosis of communities operating in a vacuum: the State and the traditional moral and social strictures of the church have no leverage in these novels.

What is celebrated in these novels is the ability of the individual to adapt and change with the times and do so, mostly, on their own terms. What is remarkable about Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy: the way in which it captures a moving target, a society in rapid transition. It is the main reason why it is so appropriate that the novels have been chosen for the 2015 One City One Book festival.  The three novels certainly tell us about we lived then, but they also, in their own inimitable ways, tell us how we got to where we are today.

very bad imitations. I threw them all away, but I remember one opening line especially:" The white May blossoms swooned into the open mouth of the grave" 6 [laughter]. Well I suppose we all begin by imitation. Before that I had only read detective stories and PG Wodehouse and the like, and here suddenly was something that was new to me, something about real life, as I was experiencing it myself, I thought it was something to emulate.