PUBLICATION: Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture
Edited by: Michaela Schrage-Früh, Tony Tracy
Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures – often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression – to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression. For more CLICK HERE
Table of Contents

- Introduction: Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture
Michaela Schrage-Früh and Tony Tracy
DRAMA - Taking the “Black Stick”: Ageing Husbands and Fathers in the Plays of J. M. Synge and Teresa Deevy
Mária Kurdi - “Are all the monks old men?” Ageing and the Male Monastic Community in Brian Friel’s The Enemy Within
Giovanna Tallone - Father Ireland on Stage: Representations of Social Change and Ageing Masculinities in Crisis
Ciara L. Murphy
POETRY - Poetics at the Limit: Embodiment, Masculinities, and Ageing in Samuel Beckett’s Early Poetry Collection Echo’s Bones
Heike Hartung - Masculinity, Ageing, and Midlife Crisis in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Paul Durcan
Anne Karhio - Not Sailing to Byzantium: Aged Masculinities and Latour’s Matters of Concern in the Late Works of Irish Male Poets
Katarzyna Ostalska
FICTION - “That the Youth May Throw Us Aside”: Fatherhood, Ageing Masculinities, and the Politics of Insecurity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction
Loic Wright - Stuck in the Old Times: A Male-character Analysis on Three Irish Novels Through Corpus Stylistics
Cassandra S. Tully - Uncanny Reflections: Older Widowers in John Banville’s The Sea, Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture and Anne Griffin’s When All is Said
Michaela Schrage-Früh - “Caught suddenly by the land shifting”: Ageing Masculinity and Rural Ireland in Recent Irish Short Fiction
Orlaith Darling - “A bridge to nowhere”: Arrested Development, Trauma, Liminality, and the Ageing Irish Exile in Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break
Clare Brannigan - “Shades of Masculinities”: Midlife and Caring Masculinity in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
Brenda O’Connell - Colm Tóibín and Henry James: Portrait of an Ageing Master
Heather Ingman
VISUAL CULTURE - Seán Keating’s Ireland – the Land of Old Men
Katarzyna Kociołek - Ageing Masculinities and Irish Traditional Music on Screen
Verena Commins and Méabh Ní Fhuartháin - Changing the Picture: Older Men’s Responses to Media Representations of Ageing in an Irish Context
Margaret O’Neill and Áine Ní Léime