NEW BOOK: Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction – Magnitudes of Telling
Paul Delaney | Routledge
This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the production, dissemination, and reception of short stories over the last few decades in Ireland. The book is generically fluid and reads short fiction in its many guises, from short-shorts to long stories, and from standalone texts included in periodicals and online forums, to stories that were published in volumes, miscellanies, and edited collections.
The book focuses especially upon anthologies and the act of anthologisation. The creation of an anthology is never a simple value-free act, since those associated with the curation of anthologies are always obliged to make decisions that are variously material, economic, formal, ideological, and aesthetic. Some of these decisions are founded upon personal preferences, others are grounded in subjective prejudices and biases; however, all have consequences for the ways that a literary culture is created, marketed, taught, and read. This new book explores this subject, and looks at the consequences for ways that we think about Irish short fiction in the contemporary moment.
“This is an immensely valuable and much needed study. It illuminates the practice and theory of Irish short fiction, in its diverse guises and compelling range of subject. In focusing not only on contemporary short stories but also on the ways we – readers and critics – talk about contemporary short fiction, Delaney provides many rich and suggestive insights that guide us back to these ‘magnitudes of telling’ and to the many platforms – anthologies and writers’ collections, magazines and periodicals – where short fiction continues to prosper.”
–Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
Paul Delaney is Associate Professor in the School of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of ‘Seán O’Faoláin: Literature, Inheritance and the 1930s’ (2014) and co-editor, with Deirdre Madden, of ‘David Marcus: Editing Ireland’ (2024). His other books include the edited volumes, ‘Dublin Tales’, with Eve Patten (2023), ‘The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English’, with Adrian Hunter (2019), ‘William Trevor: Revaluations’, with Michael Parker (2013), and ‘Reading Colm Tóibín’ (2008).