Beausang, Chris (2018) ‘I’ll Say the Bad Words I Have’: Anne Enright and Eimear McBride’s Subversive Modernisms. NPPSH Reflections, 2. pp. 80-90. ISSN 2565-6031

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Abstract

There has been an increasing tendency within literary critical discourse to refer to at least two developing trends, both in the context of Ireland and internationally. The first is an upsurge in the volume of quality work being produced by young Irish writers, and the second is a resurgence of novel-writing that re-engages modernist aesthetics, which can be seen in the fiction of writers such as Will Self, Tom McCarthy and Mike McCormack. It’s worth remarking on the centrality afforded to women’s writing in the articulation of both of these developing strands, such as Sara Baume, Claire-Louise Bennett, Joanna Walsh, Eimear McBride and Anne Enright. Brian Dillon, in his review of Bennett’s Pond (2015) in the London Review of Books, sounds a dissenting note, touching on the somewhat parochial overtones of this nascent discourse: She [Bennett] has somewhat misleadingly been set aside Eimear McBride as representative of a modernist turn among young writers in Ireland, especially women writers. Misleadingly, not because they don't share something — a commitment to voice, a syntax that is speedy, bristling and strange at first encounter — but because they sound so different…If there is a modernism of sorts at work in current fiction in Ireland, it’s less a return in the manner called for by authors such as Tom McCarthy, and more an acknowledgement of the variety of experimental traditions on which young writers now draw (Dillon, 2016, 37–38).

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	NPPSH; Anne Enright; Eimear McBride; Subversive Modernisms;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > Research Institutes > An Foras Feasa
Item ID:	10820
Depositing User:	NPPSH Editor
Date Deposited:	28 May 2019 16:16
Journal or Publication Title:	NPPSH Reflections
Publisher:	Maynooth Academic Publishing
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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