NEW BOOK: Irish Shame – A Literary Reckoning

Book Launch, New Publications

Edited by Seán Kennedy, Joseph Valente | Edinburgh University Press

The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame

  • Offers an anatomy of Irish shame as a cultural predicament
  • Combines theoretical reading with historical and institutional context
  • Includes essays by some of Ireland’s leading researchers on trauma and sexuality studies

Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish life.

For more click here.

The book launch will take place on May16th 3PM East Coast US time at the Glucksman Ireland House and they have made it available on Zoom – please email secretary [@] iasil.org for the zoom link.

Introduction: Writing Irish Shame
Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente

Part I. Ethnic Shame
1. Colonial Emasculation in Early Modern Irish Poetry: From Shame to Humiliation
Sarah E. McKibben
2. Young Ireland, Slavery and the Gender of Shame
Marjorie Howes

Part II. Religious Shame
3. Recovering from Catholicism: The Internalisation Problem in Joyce
Seán Kennedy
4. Let Us Prey: Child Sex Abuse and Catholic Bildung
Joseph Valente

Part III. Biopolitical Shame
5. Laundering Complicity: Experimental Drama and the Temporalities of Irish Shame
Claire Bracken
6. Shame and the Breastfeeding Mother in Ireland
Abby Bender
7. “you: are you complicit?” Shame, Trauma and Gender in Susanah Dickey’s Tennis Lessons
Alison Garden

Part IV. Shame and Disability
8. Disability, Embodiment and Shame in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
9. “that old shame trick”: Mothering, Trauma and Neurodiversity in Emilie Pine’s Ruth & Pen
Moynagh Sullivan

Part V. Psychoanlaytic Shame
10. The Shame of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes
Eve Watson
8. “then die of shame”: Reading Beckett’s Not I with Lacan
Alexandra Poulain

Part VI. Shame’s Joyce
12. Flirting with Shame: Performing Narration in Ulysses
Kezia Whiting

Seán Kennedy is Coordinator of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax.

Joseph Valente is Distinguished Professor of English and Disability Studies at SUNY, Buffalo.