Irishness and (Bucknell Review)

The question of what nationality means - how it is constituted, how it operates, what value it has - is clearly once again becoming a central topic in contemporary world events. Nationalism calls into question concepts such as modernism and postmodernism, with their assumption of a transnational culture that brings artists in different countries into an aesthetic community in which issues of nationality are more often effaced in favor of more general aesthetic and philosophical issues. Clearly, many writers labeled as "modernist" or "postmodernist" do not fall easily into either side of this dichotomy. Similarly, few if any of the writers discussed here fit simply into any available construction of Irishness. . The essays in this volume extend this inquiry into Irish culture and writing from the 1890s to the present. Textual tensions mirror larger conflicts between English and Irish and modernist and postmodernist in essays on Bram Stoker's Draccula and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Another explores the importance of a "collaborative modernity" in shaping W. B. Yeats's adaptation to the role of modern Irish poet, while two essays on James Joyce reconsider him as moderni