Ireland was in a rush to embrace electrification in the 1930s and 1940s, as it was digitalisation in the post-Celtic Tiger age of Yahoo and Google. In the face of this state-led dedication to light and currency, Irish literature has consistently found ways to restore stubborn materiality to the semiotic field. This depends on what this chapter calls its tradition of stupidity. Reclaimed as a device within literary texts, ‘stupidity’ is an instructive and often comic mode of emphasising embodiment and drawing attention to a persistent lack of connection. Moving through several literary examples taken from the mid-twentieth century to the present day (Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones), this chapter suggests three themes by which this stupidity is registered as a complicating factor within an electric modernity set adrift on the neoliberal current: emigration, constitutional politics, and ecology. The purpose of the examples offered is to show how disconnection functions, thematically and formally, within a networked imaginary, and how it might be repositioned within new discourses oriented around ecological crisis.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

The violence that infected the North during the decades of the Troubles was represented in a variety of forms as a generation of writers attended to how its intertwined narratives on both sides of the sectarian divide were articulated as shared experiences of national trauma in dire need of understanding and representation through the language of literature. Beginning with Seamus Heaney’s reflections in ‘Cessation 1994’ on the overwhelming difficulties but also undeniable opportunities of envisaging pathways of historical, political, and economic recovery on the eve of the Belfast Agreement, this chapter proceeds by reading Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto and Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs as two novels that continued the unfinished work in Irish literature after 1998 of representing the traumas of violence from national and global perspectives (and thus not only in the Irish context of the Troubles).

This coda examines responses to Edna O’Brien’s fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and recent novels by Eimear McBride, in order to assess the changing climate for Irish women’s fiction and characterisations of the Irish woman writer. Both sets of works anatomise women’s experience at crucial junctures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but while O’Brien’s work was banned in the 1960s for its reputedly salacious content, in contrast, Eimear McBride’s sexually explicit 2013 novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (though it took years to find a publisher) was immediately embraced by critics and celebrated as an exemplar of contemporary Irish writing. The chapter discusses responses to the female bildungsroman and representations of female sexuality, sexual abuse, and violence.

Mid-century Ireland was a society of surreal contradictions: an island that declared neutrality an emergency, a nation that became a republic by accident. This chapter examines how Irish writers responded to and reimagined the political and ideological contours of both states on the island in the post-war period, and in particular the creation by artists of altered states in which to seek refuge from the foreclosed reality of official Ireland(s). It charts the responses made by a group of writers whose themes ranged from a historical sense of dislocation and the search for a voice and an audience to an openness to vision and a careful attention to the environment. Initially discussing the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Brian O’Nolan and Edna O’Brien, it outlines how they conceived of their roles within and beyond the nation in this time of change. The chapter then discusses how the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland provided the backdrop and impulse for new collective aesthetic projects in these later decades, such as the Field Day project and Atlantis magazine, that advanced the use of literature to imagine alternate Irelands beyond the pale of state and nation.