Celtic Tiger fiction

This article forms part of a special journal issue on *Ireland and the Contemporary*. Its focus is the figure of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, who emerged in a newspaper column in the late 1990s and became the central character in an ongoing series of highly popular novels in Ireland. Looking in detail at the revisions made by the author Paul Howard to his initially self-published first novel *The Miseducation of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly* (2000) for its republication by O’Brien Press in 2004, I set those changes against the background of the rapid globalization of the Irish economy and society during the Celtic Tiger years. I argue that during this period the citizens of Ireland were taught to think of themselves in a way that aligned increasingly closely with the tenets of Anglo-American neoliberal capitalism. Using the Ross revisions as an exemplary case study of this broader shift, I argue for the central role played by re-education in the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.

THE INTERVIEW, conducted with Claire Kilroy in Dublin in September 2015, follows up one published in the Irish Literary Supplement in 2006 at the very zenith of the Celtic Tiger. Issues touched on include the psychological and fiscal impact of the boom and subsequent recession on the Irish literary writer, and concludes with a discussion of the physical, emotional, mental, and neurological fallout of childbirth and motherhood, reflecting Kilroy’s non-fiction publication, “F for Phone”, submitted to Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith’s Winter Pages just prior to the interview. With Kilroy’s blessing, a metanarrative about the obstacles to conducting the interview due to the constraints imposed by childcare was included. The scholarly overview, it is noted, “speaks to the public face of the working mother, striving to conform to the norms of her profession.” By contrast, the record of the interview’s many interruptions is an honest representation “of the behind-the-scenes compromises… that presenting that façade entails.”
THE OVERVIEW considers Kilroy’s novels All Summer (2003), Tenderwire (2006), All Names Have Been Changed (2010), and The Devil I Know (2012) as responses to free market capitalism of the Ireland of the author’s lifetime. The last is considered as an Irish response to the recent global recession that deploys the “Big House” genre, a literary tradition sustained by Irish women. In Kilroy’s novels, educated but alienated protagonists of ambiguous identity live transient lives. Stylistically, this suggests a postmodern refusal of literary conventions and stable identity, but thematically it posits the fragmentary nature of life in the postnationalist Ireland of Kilroy’s adult life. The overview concludes that future instructors seeking a representative oeuvre of the Celtic Tiger period will turn to Kilroy’s work.

[Long pre-print draft of a chapter to appear in a special collection on The Trouble of Memory: Ireland and Iceland, edited by Fionnuala Dillane and Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir]

Although political responses to the neoliberal economic crisis have been qualitatively different in the two countries, with Ireland submitting to austerity, while Iceland rejected the bailout terms, resonances can be detected in literary responses to abstract financialization and neoliberalization at the height of the boom. This essay explores the representation of memory and financialization in two “boom novels” from Iceland and Ireland, Andri Snær Magnason’s Lovestar (2002; 2012) and Molly McCormack’s Protection (2005) and, arguing that both texts mediate analogous anxieties around the financial penetration and commodification of memory, national history, and personal subjectivity during the “Celtic Tiger” and “Viking Capitalism” periods, employing hybridized mixtures of speculative, dystopian, and “critical irrealist” aesthetics within more conventional realist narratives in order to register the  phantasmagoria of fictitious capital and the anticipation of impending social crisis at the height of their respective “booms.”

Claire Kilroy attended the “First Intensive Seminar Week on Irish Studies” that Dr Pilar Villar Argáiz organised at the University of Granada (from 15th to 18th of December 2015), where the writer gave a talk about her latest novel, The Devil I Know. The aim of this interview was both to understand how the post-Celtic Tiger social context motivated not only the content of this novel but also its formal features, and to map the correlation between these two aspects. Kilroy also speaks about the political and cultural background of her book, her literary heritage, the creative process behind the composition of this novel, its characterisation devices and narrative structure, and her next writing projects.

A Star Called Henry (1999), do escritor irlandês Roddy Doyle (1958-), é o primeiro livro da trilogia The Last Roundup, cujo protagonista é Henry Smart. Este nasce em Dublin no início do século XX e desempenha papel importante na luta pela independência da Irlanda. Juntamente com os Irish Volunteers, Smart combate no Levante de Páscoa de 1916, auxilia na escrita da declaração da independência do país e torna-se soldado do Irish Republican Army (IRA) durante a Guerra da Independência (1919-1921). Henry é um herói, mas não do tipo clássico: filho de um assassino de aluguel e de uma adolescente pobre, Smart é ladrão desde os primeiros anos de vida e, durante suas lutas pela Irlanda, afirma não estar interessado no ideal nascionalista, uma vez que luta por dinheiro, comida e reconhecimento. Vivendo às margens da sociedade, Henry Smart desconstrói uma aura romântica em torno do Levante, da Guerra da Independência e dos heróis nacionalistas. O ponto de partida desta pesquisa é o questionamento sobre o impulso do autor em escrever um romance histórico em tempos de prosperidade financeira, pois Doyle publica a obra durante o período conhecido como Tigre Celta (1994-2008). Também questionamos por que o autor decide representar Dublin e os heróis nacionais de modo contrastante com o simbolismo nacionalista. Entendemos que o contexto de publicação do romance influencia a produção artística e, dessa forma, ao escolhera temática histórica, Doyle constrói uma crítica ao nacionalismo do início do século XX e também à sociedade do Tigre Celta. O autor entrelaça temporalidades a fim de expor as lacunas e inconsistências do passado e também do presente.