Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, And The Second World War Paperback English by Anna Teekell - 15 Jun 2018

New

Anna Teekell

Taking seriously ireland's euphemism for world war ii, "the emergency," anna teekell's emergency writing asks both what happens to literature written during a state of emergency and what it means for writing to be a response to an emergency. Anchored in close textual analysis of works by samuel beckett, elizabeth bowen, flann o'brien, louis macneice, denis devlin, and patrick kavanagh, and suppported by archival material and historical research, emergency writing shows how irish late modernism was a response to the sociopolitical conditions of a newly independent irish free state and to a fully emerged modernism in literature and art. What emerges in irish writing in the wake of independence, of the gaelic revival, of yeats and of joyce, is a body of work that invokes modernism as a set of discursive practices with which to counter the free state's political pieties. Emergency writing provides a new approach to literary modernism and to the literature of conflict, considering the ethical dilemma of performing neutrality-emotionally, politically, and rhetorically-in a world at war.

9780810137257

English

Northwestern University Press

15 Jun 2018

280

Anna teekell is an assistant professor of english at christopher newport university.

1 - 5 Years

An engaged reading of the politics of language use in ireland during world war ii, emergency writing demonstrates how the war years mark a particular moment of emergence in post-independence irish writing, as the legacy of literary modernism comes to empower diverse stylistic challenges to official narratives of irish identity." - Damien keane, author of ireland and the problem of information