Author Description

This book offers a series of readings in Irish culture in the light of the set of crises that beset the project of modernization in Ireland from the late 1960s onwards. These crises are argued to have contributed to a crisis of representation that has afflicted a variety of intellectuals - novelists, playwrights, filmmakers and literary critics. McCarthy locates the source of this problem in the overly narrow conceptualization of modernization and modernity that has held sway in Irish intellectual life since the 1960s, and in a lack of attention paid to the negative aspects of the processes of modernization. In particular, McCarthy points to the need to find a more nuanced response to the legacies of nationalism as we move into the 21st century.