New Publication: Science, Technology and Irish Modernism
Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism
Edited by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng
Hardcover $65.00 9780815635932
Paper $34.95 9780815635987
Ebook 9780815654483
To order: https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/95/science-technology-and-irish-modernism/
“Succeeds wonderfully in laying out a wide range of Irish interests in science and technology. This book will become a go-to resource for interested students and for scholars wishing to launch new inquiries into the relationship between Irish modernism and science and technology.”
—Michael Rubenstein, author of Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial
“This pathbreaking collection reveals how science and the literary imagination, ‘intimate strangers’, are inextricably entangled in Irish modernism.”
—Ronan McDonald, The University of Melbourne
Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology.
Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.