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Chapter 13 - Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture

from Part III - Forms of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2020

By
Sarah Townsend
Edited by
Eric Falci  and
Paige Reynolds
Eric Falci
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Paige Reynolds
Affiliation:
College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
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Summary

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.

Keywords

Celtic TigerRecessionClichéWomen’s WritingGenre FictionGenderMiddle ClassLiterary Marketplace
Type
Chapter
Information
Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020 , pp. 246 - 262
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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