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ABSTRACT
In this article, I analyse the literary realism of four women novelists in the context of the Celtic Phoenix. While realism has always been closely associated with capitalism as a genre and form, a neo-modernist turn emerged in Irish fiction writing in the years following 2012. This has been analysed in terms of a formal reaction to or against the capitalist realism of austerity policies. The realist novel, however, has remained popular with contemporary women writers, and, in this article I examine novels by Naoise Dolan, Niamh Campbell, Sara Baume, and Sally Rooney, asking how their work subverts or critiques capitalism not just in content, but in form. In particular, artmaking emerges as a self-reflexive motif through which these writers gain critical distance from the totalising capitalist systems they inhabit, and consider the ethics of creative production within this system.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. O’Toole, “Writing the Boom.”
2. I am thinking here of novels such as Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), Rob Doyle’s Here Are the Young Men (2014), Claire Kilroy’s the Devil I Know (2015), E.M. Reapy’s Red Dirt (2016), as well as short story collections like Colin Barrett’s Young Skins (2013). Eoin Flannery gives an overview of some of this fiction in his Irish Times article, “The Irish fiction that proved a match for Celtic Tiger’s financial fictions,” June 10, 2022.
3. Shonkwiler and La Berge, “Introduction,” 1.
4. Crosthwaite, Market Logistics.
5. Shonkwiler and La Berge, “Introduction,” 8.
6. Crosthwaite, Market Logistics, 4.
7. Cited in Shonkwiler and La Berge, 15.
8. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 12–3.
9. Ibid.
10. This is, in particular, an issue for Sally Rooney’s huge commercial and popular success, leading to TV adaptations of her first two novels and a string of merchandise for her third. While this presents an interesting avenue of research, however, I do not have scope to cover it here; Cronin, “Sex & Socialism.”
11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 8.
12. Whittle, “We Were Young.”
13. Reynolds, “From Crisis to Care;” and McCann, “Forms of Care.”
14. Beausang, “Sex & Socialism.”
15. Dolan, Exciting Times, 119.
16. Ibid., 64.
17. Ibid., 119.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Hughes, “Sex & Socialism.”
20. Dolan, Exciting Times, 64.
21. Campbell, “Sex & Socialism.”
22. Campbell, This Happy, 40.
23. Sontag, On Photography, 40.
24. Campbell, We Were Young, 9.
25. Ibid., 7.
26. Ibid., 41.
27. Ibid., 41; 135.
28. Ibid., 120.
29. Ibid., 121.
30. Whittle, “We Were Young.”
31. Campbell, We Were Young, 54.
32. Chiapello and Boltanski, New Spirit of Capitalism.
33. Campbell, “Sex and Socialism;” and Campbell, We Were Young, 135.
34. Campbell, We Were Young, 136.
35. Ibid., 55.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 239.
38. Ibid.
39. Hughes, “Sex and Socialism.”
40. Baume, A Line Made, 27.
41. Freigel, “The Art of Falling Apart.”
42. Baume, A Line Made, 129.
43. Ibid., 141–3.
44. Ibid., 262.
45. Shonkwiler and La Berge, “Introduction,” 20.
46. Ibid.
47. Baume, A Line Made, 168.
48. Ibid., 258.
49. Powers, “Sara Baume’s New Novel.”
50. Baume, A Line Made, 8.
51. Fisk, “Reading Sally Rooney.”
52. Rooney, Conversations with Friends, 45; Ibid., 73; Ibid., 231; and Rooney, Normal People, 34.
53. Rooney, Beautiful World, 24.
54. Ibid., 19.
55. Ibid., 151; 96.
56. Ibid., 19.
57. Eagleton, Culture, 20.
58. Rooney, Beautiful World, 226.
59. Shonkwiler and La Berge, 19.
60. Rooney, Beautiful World, 180.
61. Ibid., 179–80.
62. Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire, 46.
63. Rooney, Beautiful World, 333–4.
64. Beausang, “Sex and Socialism.”
65. This type of writing is also well-represented in recent North American literature by women, such as My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh, The New Me (2019) by Halle Butler, and Luster (2020) by Raven Leilani.
66. Rooney, Beautiful World, 75.
67. Ibid., 96.
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