The rise of the phoenix: restoration and renaissance in contemporary Irish writing

The focus of this special edition of the Irish Studies Review is on responses in Irish writing to the social, political, economic, and cultural realignments in Irish life that began after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008. In particular, the essays here examine how Irish writers have reckoned with the rise of the so-called “Celtic Phoenix,” a term that gained currency in the middle of the 2010s, and how the form, direction, and dissemination of Irish literature have evolved during this period. Obviously, to provide a completely exhaustive account of Irish literature from 2008 to the present would require significantly more space than is available here, and it need hardly be stated that it was not possible to comprehensively survey the entire literary landscape over the course of eight essays, nor was that our intention. Furthermore, although poetry, film, and, to a lesser extent, drama have flourished during this period, the scope of this special edition encompasses primarily prose fiction, with some attention paid to non-fiction. The short story and the novel, in particular, have been characterised as central to a current literary “renaissance” in Ireland, and the formal daring and thematic boldness of this new writing has been enabled and engendered by the “agility” and “dynamism of Ireland’s publishing scene.”¹ The authors here engage with some of the key literary directions, trends, and concerns, mostly, though not exclusively, in the work of writers who have emerged over the last decade and a half, and it is our aim that this scholarship will usefully contribute to the growing body of critical work on what now appears, even at this close juncture, to be one of the most significant 10 to 15 years in modern Irish literary history.

The phrase “Celtic Phoenix” requires some elucidation. As a locution, it clearly evokes the term “Celtic Tiger” and substitutes the image of a ruthless, rapacious predator with the immortal figure of the phoenix – a periodically self-immolating and miraculously resurrecting bird of myth. While both phrases could be viewed as potentially glib or reductive, they are important signifiers that have gained significant, though not equal, cultural valence in recent years. In the first part of the opening essay, Aran Ward Sell offers a useful cultural history of the semantic and conceptual evolution of the term “Celtic Phoenix.” Although the phrase became widespread towards the end of the 2010s in economic commentaries – and also, as Ward Sell suggests, popularised through Paul Howard’s creation Ross O’Carroll Kelly – its usage can in fact be traced back as far as 2008 to the months immediately following the global financial crash. As Ward Sell argues, the phrase refers almost exclusively to the recovery of the Irish economy, and almost always within the context of the restoration of the same global, neoliberal order that had just collapsed. In this sense, the Celtic Phoenix primarily signifies how Ireland was positioned or came to benefit from the recovery of the capitalist system. This narrowly economic definition differentiates it from the Celtic Tiger, which although in its origins also stood for the economic boom in Ireland from the early 1990s to 2008, has in fact come to refer to an entire period of national economic, social, political, and cultural transformation. The Celtic Phoenix, on the other hand, has not attained a similar pervasiveness as an historicising shorthand for the past 15 years, with many commentators preferring terms such as “post-crash period,” perhaps reflecting the enormous trauma of the crash on the Irish psyche.

The Celtic Phoenix also suggests in some way a revival of the energetic heyday of the Celtic Tiger years, and perhaps even its economic and social reconstruction. The reluctance to adopt it more broadly may be connected to a deep and abiding scepticism towards what some see as the mirage of Celtic Tiger success – that it was in fact a Paper Tiger. Nonetheless, Ireland has undergone remarkable changes since 2008. If the 2010s began as a period of deep social, political and economic crisis in Ireland and has come to be defined by narratives of national moribundity, widespread disillusionment with the Celtic Tiger years, and not insignificant resentment towards the EU and the global economic order, the latter part of the decade can be understood as a phase of national reinvention and renewal that engendered radical, even unprecedented, social, constitutional, and political change. Social liberalisation was accelerated, for instance, through the introduction of Civil Partnership in 2010 and the Marriage Equality referendum of 2015, the election of the first gay man in Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach in 2017, and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018. This phase also coincided with a turn away from the US-UK sphere of influence towards a strengthening sense of common European identity that was significantly shaped after 2016 by antagonism within Ireland towards the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. In domestic politics, support for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continued to decline and both parties were compelled to enter into government together for the first time, initially through a confidence and supply agreement in 2016, and full coalition (including the Green Party) in 2020. For the first time, the Sinn Féin party emerged as a major opposition force. In Northern Ireland, Brexit caused a crisis within political unionism, destabilised the Good Friday Agreement consensus, and has forced major reconsiderations of North–South relationships, as well as East–West, in political, cultural, and historical contexts.

As Ireland nears the end of its Decade of Centenaries, then, its national destiny appears deeply bound up with two countervailing forms of liberalism: social liberalism, which has served to expand the civil and political rights of a number of marginalised groups within Ireland, and neoliberalism, which has appeared to disenfranchise and impoverish some of the most vulnerable classes within Irish society, most obviously through the blight of the current housing and homelessness crisis, a long term result of the 2008 crash. In literary terms, there has also been a significant transformation of the profile of and contexts for Irish literature. Over the last decade or so, there has been a boom in Irish literary activity, with the emergence of a new generation of young fiction writers writing reflectively about the antagonisms and dynamics of their own social and cultural milieu, a thriving literary festival ecosystem, and – even if the major international publishers still dominate and set the market conditions for Irish literature – the establishment of more home-grown publishing houses and journals. At the same time, and as several of the essays here observe, there remains a cautiousness among Irish writers to celebrate or to even embrace the idea of national recovery, and indeed, much of Celtic Phoenix writing is coloured by a deep wariness of narratives of success.

The picture, then, is one of variance. The Celtic Phoenix has undoubtedly proven to be a fecund period for Irish literature. Yet the responses of contemporary Irish writing to Ireland's past, present, and future are perhaps more ambivalent; it is certainly difficult to argue that the optimism inherent in the phrase “Celtic Phoenix” is mirrored in the prose literature. Tracing those responses is a key aim of this special edition. From a stylistic point of view, certain trends within recent prose narratives can be discerned, many of which are explored here. In the second part of his essay, Ward Sell observes a number of tendencies in the fiction of this period, one of which has been a resurgence in modernist-inflected narratives in the work of writers such as Eimear McBride, Anna Burns, and Mike McCormack, as well as a flowering of Irish dystopian and/or Gothic/horror fictions by writers such as Oisín Fagan, Conor O’Callaghan, and Danny Denton to name just a few. This flourishing of experimental styles and genre fiction has not displaced, however, the continued supremacy of social realist fiction, a literary style well suited to retrospective Tiger-sceptical narratives and millenialist books about personal development, identity, and belonging in the present dispensation.

These trends are also keenly observed by Orlaith Darling in her essay, which, echoing Ward Sell’s, suggests that in its exploration of the anxieties following the 2008 Financial Crisis, Celtic Phoenix writing tends either towards the utilisation of modernist styles and techniques to examine “the fragmenting of social certainties” or towards the adoption of social realism to chart the tensions and anxieties of the immediate moment. Darling, who focuses on novels by Naoise Dolan, Niamh Campbell, Sara Baume, and Sally Rooney, identifies the attractions of the social realist novel to these writers because the genre has been an index of capitalism since its inception in the early eighteenth century. It could be argued that in spite of the radical transformations within Ireland’s socio-political sphere, Ireland’s strong economic resurgence did not herald a reimagining of the basic structures of Ireland’s political economy; rather it signalled a near total restoration of the economic model of growth adopted during the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s full reintegration into a system that precipitated the Financial Crisis. In this context, as Darling points out, the sheer resilience of neoliberalism precipitates questions about whether realist novels can really provide any meaningful critique of the global economic system. Such an anxiety, she argues, is inherent in the novels by Dolan, Campbell, Baume, and Rooney; ultimately, she suggests, these writers collectively provide two types of response. The first is a kind of “stasis and paralysis” and the second is a return to the “small scale and local.” These responses demonstrate that while Irish novelists are keen, incisive witnesses to the facts, the awareness of powerlessness this witness brings can itself lead to forms of ambivalence and retreat.

The aesthetic difficulties of productively interrogating or even fully apprehending the contemporary conjuncture are also considered in Simon Workman’s essay, which centres on a new cluster of speculative Irish fiction that has emerged in the last decade or so. Focusing on novels by Kevin Barry, Sarah Davis-Goff, Catherine Prasifka, and Danny Denton, Workman considers how the speculative mode, with its ontological obliquities and temporal distortions, is particularly commensurate with the environmental and socio-economic complexities now facing Ireland. Specifically, these novels centre on problems and crises that have national and regional manifestations but are ultimately global in scale and extent: ecological degradation, sea-level rise, food scarcity, pandemics, and the social and psychic effects of neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism. In coming to terms with such issues, particularly the hyperobject of climate change, these novels are often at their most effective in moments that de-privilege anthropocentric perspectives by establishing existential intimacies and political affinities with the natural and non-human realm.

Such perspectives, which are borne out of an awareness of the immensity of global economic and political forces that operate beyond the control of ordinary citizens, serve to underline much of the hesitation about national recovery found in recent Irish writing. The continued decline in support for the two main political parties over the last decade is an obvious measure of the disillusionment about the capacity of the established political classes to effect meaningful change. Nonetheless, even if the structure of the Irish economy remained largely unchanged, social liberalisation was accelerated during the 2010s. Social reformation was shaped by interrogations of the past: along with referenda on marriage equality and the laws regulating abortion, a number of key reports were produced from 2005 to 2021 on institutional abuse, including the Ferns Report (2005), the Murphy Report (2009), the Ryan Report (2009), the Cloyne Report (2011), the McAleese Report (2013), and the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report (2021). These reports were significant drivers of the legislative process of social reform.

Irish writers have produced their own types of response to this cultural dynamic, and two essays here explore this context. In her essay, Bridget English argues that a literary by-product of these traumas has been the rise of the essay and the memoir. She observes that shifts in attitudes within Irish society have opened up a space and appetite for probing, frequently painful examinations of both the past and hitherto taboo subjects such as first-hand personal accounts of shame, repression, and abuse. Focusing on recent “illness narratives” by Sinéad Gleeson, Emilie Pine, and Sophie White, English argues that these books are both influenced by international trends in non-fiction, as well as speaking to specific Irish contexts in their exploration of how patients are treated in Irish medical and psychiatric institutions, in turn provoking deeper questions about how the Irish state has historically treated women’s bodies in state and church-run institutions. As with Darling, English sees that the opportunities opened up by social liberalisation also come with a sense of vigilance that is characteristic of artists and writers of the last decade: these works of non-fiction are important forms of contemporary narrative, English argues, because they not only raise further questions around the historical role of institutions in Ireland but also how institutions operating in the neoliberal economy continue to exert forms of social control over the female body. The themes that English identifies in non-fiction narratives are also present in fiction. As with English, Selen Aktari-Sevgi identifies illness and pregnancy as central concerns in recent fiction by women. She analyses two novels by Emma Donoghue and Elaine Feeney, both of which contain hospital settings, exploring historical and contemporary issues of secrecy, sexuality, illness, and abuse. Aktari-Sevgi argues that these contemporary texts promote female solidarity arising out of a deep historical awareness of the historical mistreatment of women in church and state-run institutions. Interestingly, what the essays by Darling, English, Aktari-Sevgi, and Workman commonly identify across genres and styles is an increasing turn towards aesthetics of care, which may be one of the defining characteristics of the literature of this period.

The demographic profile of Ireland was transformed during the Celtic Tiger by inward migration, which brought issues of nationality, race, ethnicity, and citizenship into focus. In her essay, Kersti Tarien Powell offers a fascinating examination of the representation of otherness in some recent crime fiction, arguing that the genre has been well placed to reflect social, political, and economic changes in Irish society. As notions of the “stranger” are often central to crime fiction, Tarien Powell suggests, the genre is therefore the perfect vehicle to explore questions of otherness. However, she argues, migrants or those of a migrant background have largely continued to be portrayed in ways that are stereotypical or less than convincing. In exploring novels by Andrew Nugent, Brian O’Connor, and Tana French, Tarien Powell detects a lingering hesitancy, with some variation in approach, nuance, and success, within the genre to resolve questions of identity and belonging. The representation of identity is also the subject of Moonyoung Hong’s consideration of the short stories of Yan Ge, the Chinese writer who now lives in Ireland. As with Tarien Powell, Hong detects a problematic Orientalist tendency in Irish writers when writing about non-Irish or non-white Irish characters. For Hong, while Irish writing has always attempted to distinguish itself from its British counterpart through anticolonial manoeuvres, it has nonetheless been complicit in sustaining the same Orientalist perspective. The wider context for this complicity, she argues, is that Irish literature is nonetheless part of a western cultural mindset that projects onto the Orient anxieties about its own modernity. In this context, Yan Ge’s short fiction, she argues, offers an important perspective that “re-orients” the Irish reader to the perspective of the Other themselves.

Themes of representation and inclusion are also central to Paul Delaney's authoritative exploration of the anthologisation of short stories. The last 15 years have not just seen a resurgence of the short story form in Irish writing, but a steady increase in the number of short story anthologies. Delaney argues that every anthology is an act of “gatekeeping” and therefore the choices that editors make about which stories to include, and under what criteria, will necessarily shape both the canon and the literary heritage. As Delaney demonstrates, the criteria for inclusion have expanded greatly as definitions of citizenship, Irishness, and identity have transformed. There has also been a productive disruption of residual distinctions between literary and genre fiction as editors of anthologies have tried to capture the full aesthetic spectrum of Irish short fiction, both historical and contemporary. These admirably reorienting and revisionist editorial interventions in the field accord with the formal eclecticism and genre hybridisation that increasingly characterises the contemporary Irish story. It is important to note that these developments in the practice and anthologisation of the short story have occurred within, and been partly engendered by, a shifting ecosystem of textual production and mediation. The growth in the number of journals and home-grown publishers, as well as the continued publication of anthologies by large international publishers, has led to more varied and inclusive anthologies, while at the same time compelling editors to examine their own role in canon formation, representation, and inclusion.

The scholarship in this special edition demonstrates that the scope of concerns within Irish fiction and non-fiction since 2008 range across an extraordinary number of contexts, including narratives of national recovery; the imperative to examine of histories of trauma and abuse; the liberations, opportunities, and challenges opened up by social, cultural, and technological transformation; the apparent imperishability of neoliberalism and the global economic system; the demographic and cultural effects of international migration and the expansion of definitions of identity; and the haunting spectres of ecological disaster, civilisational collapse, and planetary catastrophe. In these conditions, in which national and global destinies are inextricably linked, Irish literary culture has flourished, producing and re-producing a mixed variety of new and established styles, genres, and modes of dissemination in response. Accordingly, what the essays collected here show is that Celtic Phoenix-era literature is characterised by the dynamics of invention, energy, and care, as well as interrogation, ambivalence, and anxiety.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Jordan, “A New Irish Literary Boom.”