‘Irish Fiction and Gender in the Long Twenty-First Century’ begins by observing that fiction by Irish women is in a position of unprecedented authority, and is winning critical and commercial success on a scale never seen before. Referencing Anna Burns, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, and others, the chapter also explores Edna O’Brien’s novel Wild Decembers (1999) and Soula Emmanuel’s Wild Geese (2023). It is argued that between these two novels, we can trace not only changes in Irish society but also some of the ways in which gender is produced and defined by social context. It extends this analysis to a range of twenty-first-century novels, including Mary Costello’s The River Capture (2019) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021). Although these novels deploy a range of fictional techniques, it is noted that there is a recurrence of modernist forms, which the author refers to as a ‘stubborn modernism’.

‘Joyce and Irish Modernism’ initially situates Irish modernism of the mid twentieth century in the context of social and cultural instability. However, while Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) might suggest that the postcolonial upheavals of the period are the main source of insecurity for writers at the time, there is equally an argument that, for subsequent writers, it is actually the figure of Joyce himself that is the challenge; attempting to write Irish fiction in the wake of Joyce would drive Irish writers to experiment with new ways of writing. This could be argued in relation to Beckett’s early fiction, such as Murphy (1938), or as late as Watt (1953), which suggest the shadow of Joyce, as do the works of Flann O’Brien. This is less true of Elizabeth Bowen’s particular form of modernism, although traces of the Joycean legacy remain in more recent twenty-first-century writers.

‘The Irish Novel and Global Literary Culture’ takes a world literary systems approach to the study of the Irish novel. Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (1999), and the work of Mark McGurl, Sarah Brouillette, and others, it is argued that a literary system, understood transnationally, to some extent conditions literary production. Ireland provides a paradigmatic case here, initially in a European context, as a peripheral literature capable of capitalising on early twentieth century European cultural upheavals. Likewise, the post-Second World War consolidation of the United States as a new centre of literary culture provided a congenial environment for many Irish writers, a number of whom would be based, permanently or temporarily, in the country. In several instances, this can be connected to Irish literary novelists who have embraced popular generic forms, such as the crime novel, romance, and western.

‘Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Limits of Fiction’ concentrates on Beckett’s post-war trilogy of novels, Molloy (1951; trans. 1955), Malone Dies (1951; trans. 1958), and The Unnamable (1953; trans. 1960). The novels are characterised by an extreme interiority, so that the speaking voice eventually dissolves into the physical world. While these novels have recognisably Irish linguistic turns and references to the symbols and iconography of the Irish Free State, they very much sit outside Irish fiction of the period, even though the fictional forms they pioneered will make possible much later Irish fiction, as is evident when the critical reception of his work in Ireland during the 1950s is traced. Equally, it is possible to discern in the trilogy Beckett’s experience of involvement with the Resistance in France during the Second World War; and these two points of reference, Ireland and France, make it possible to question universalising readings of his work.

‘Fractured Selves’ observes that during the period known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, from approximately 1994 until the economic crash of 2008, it was noted that Irish fiction (with the exceptions of genres such as crime fiction or ‘chick-lit’) was not dealing with the changing reality of Irish society, but was instead fixated on the past. Considering novels by Deirdre Madden, Donal Ryan, Neil Jordan, and Sally Rooney, what begins to emerge in Irish writing is a deeply destabilised sense of self, attributable to the impression that the certainties of Irish life that had grounded personality have been displaced. In particular, Eimear McBride’s 2013 novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing can stand as indicative of the tendency towards disintegration in the narrative voice, as can Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), which is judged to be the major Irish novel of the twenty-first century so far.

‘Ulysses’ positions James Joyce’s novel as arguably the most famous Irish novel in history and, simultaneously, a work that puts into question those three terms: Ireland, novel, and history. Ulysses can be read as a disruption of narrativity itself, through a reordering of temporality, in the novel’s focus on instants of vital experience and each moment’s entanglement with other times. As such, it questions the possibility of a linear historiography. As Joyce releases narration from straightforward realist sequence, he recasts standard plots of nineteenth century, such as the extramarital affair and the story of individual formation, through a varied and fragmented series of narrative forms. Ulysses adapts literary modes drawn from multiple European literatures to develop characters with complex relationships with Ireland. Ultimately, this problematising of key definitional terms has been liberating for subsequent Irish writers, particularly women, in devising new forms to give voice to hitherto occluded experience.

‘The Novels and Novellas of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’ traces the development of the major Irish-language modernist novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Ó Cadhain began by translating for the state-run agency An Gúm, before publishing his first collection of short stories, Idir Shúgradh is Dáiríre (1939). However, his major achievement is Cré na Cille, first published serially in the Irish Press in 1949. This is one of the major Irish modernist novels. Set in a cemetery in the West of Ireland, the characters are the deceased lying in their graves, talking endlessly about the world they have left behind them; it is, at one level, a book made of talk. As such, it both gestures towards Irish-language orature and to modernist experiments with literary form. Ó Cadhain’s later works, such as the novella An Eochair (1953), confirm his status as an important and innovative Irish modernist whose critical reputation continues to grow and evolve.

The figure of a spiral line leaps into Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! (2008). I propose Spiegelman’s spiral as an emblem for the comics form, which underlines its plastic “being” or ontology as continuous transformation and co-mixing. I then move to situate Spiegelman’s comics form in relation to larger, longer histories of modernist aesthetics. Reading the resonances of Spiegelman’s spiral backward through twentieth-century literature and the visual arts suggests his pages as cells of modernist formal experiment after modernism. Finally, I switch back to (re)examine Spiegelman’s spiral as a ploy for his Mom’s attention, not MoMA’s. The form of Spiegelman’s spiral may be an abstract line, but it cannot be purified of the context of its autobiographical origins in a scene of mother–child play. Here the spiral’s dynamic form morphs to embody the continual oscillation in Spiegelman’s work between filiation and affiliation. In this dialectical spiral of filiation–affiliation–filiation, Spiegelman’s work recalls Edward Said’s account of modernism, which offers us new grounds for situating the cartoonist in a modernist lineage.

Throughout Allegro, Hammerstein and Rodgers offer their own insights into their contemporary medical world. Through how they depict physicians, patients, diseases and even doctor’s wives, they drew upon familiar images from popular culture to infuse their everyman morality tale with a sense of realism that heightens the modernist, experimental qualities of the production. In addition to Allegro, two films from the time, Arrowsmith (1931, based on Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel) and A Man to Remember (1938), both offer portrayals of the medical profession. Of special note in the score are its four ballet sequences, choreographed by Agnes de Mille, who also directed the musical early on, the waltz ‘Money Isn’t Everything’ and the motoristic title song and ‘Yatata’. The chapter concludes with discussions of the unrealized television version of Allegro and Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, which is also on a medical theme and includes vestiges of Allegro.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the New Journalism staged a revolt against two prevailing kinds of expertise: journalistic and literary. Centering reporting on an embodied, situated, individual perspective, and defying the canons of objectivity, the New Journalists helped shift American literary culture from a modernist veneration of impersonal poetry and fiction to an identity-focused era of creative nonfiction. It broke decisively with the powerful norms of Cold War liberalism. The twenty-first century has an afterlife in both the institutions of creative writing and the norms of an increasingly illiberal media sphere.

If “modernism” labels the aesthetic mode of relating to modernity and modernization, this chapter posits that a modifier is needed for thinking about and understanding Turkish modernism: syncretic. For painters in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, learning to speak the language of easel painting – the ultimate lingua franca they aspired to communicate through – was a laborious and gradual process, let alone participating in or contributing to what might be considered its modernist manifestations. Understanding and appreciating the modernism their artworks came to embody requires the historian as well as the onlooker to embrace the mispronunciations, the direct translations, the awkward appropriations, and the envious emulations, as much as highlighting the more fluent and effortless instances of speaking the language of oil painting that these artists eagerly adopted. Rather than evaluating the aesthetic worth of these artistic endeavors through the lens of formal affinity to their Western counterparts, it is crucial to see these paintings as a series of negotiations and articulations that evince larger societal and cultural transformations.

There has been a longstanding tendency within the domain of Turkish and Comparative Literary Studies to associate the history of Turkish modernism with Nâzım Hikmet’s early career in the Soviet Union by focusing on his mediation of the international avant-garde. While his early futurist poems calling for the abolition of traditional verse are frequently cited as illustrating the emergence of Turkish modernism, his prose poems “The Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” and “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” signify the conclusion of a Soviet-inflected Turkish avant-garde. Acknowledging the importance of Nâzım’s early poetics, this chapter provides a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of Turkish modernism’s “Easterly” trajectory. Scholars of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literary Studies refuse to ascribe any literary value to socialist realist aesthetics, immediately dismissing it as Soviet-sponsored dogma. Challenging this critical “prejudice” against leftist literatures (excepting the avant-garde), this chapter demonstrates that the history of Turkish modernism cannot be understood without exploring its entanglements with the histories of socialist realism and Marxian aesthetics.

Abdulla Goran (d. 1962) was an eminent promoter of, and contributor to, the modernization of Kurdish poetry. In his own time, Goran was hailed by many contemporary writers, critics, and poets as the leader of this endeavor. While describing his project in modernizing Kurdish poetic forms, for instance, Goran mentions only two achievements, both of them on the grounds that they were motivated by a patriotic sentiment: the replacement of classical quantitative meters with syllabic meters, and the “purification” of the language from non-Kurdish loanwords. However, we know that Goran was not the first modernist to dabble in syllabic meters or to attempt to “purify” the language of poetry. This chapter focuses on the main reasons for his immediate popularity. It argues, first, that, unlike many of his peers, Goran publicly identified as a modernist from the outset; that he greatly contributed to the expansion of Kurdish poetic forms and the promotion of Kurdish free verse; and that he played a major role in the internationalization of modern Kurdish poetry.

Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s magnum opus Leg over Leg (al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq, 1855) is perhaps the most important work of Arabic literature from the nineteenth century. It laid the foundation for modernist Arabic prose at once rooted in Arabic literature's classical forms, language, and genres and pushed them to innovative and modern critical ends. Despite al-Shidyāq’s unprecedented redirection of the forms of classical Arabic literature to modern critical ends, Leg over Leg and the roots of Arabic literary modernity and modernist prose it sprouted were systematically marginalized to the point that by the mid twentieth century they had become largely irrelevant and forgotten. This chapter outlines how twentieth-century literary critics covered up Leg over Leg’s pioneering modernist roots, elaborates the nature of al-Shidyāq’s modernism, and argues that it is still rich with potential.

The Iranian author Ṣādiq Hidāyat (usually anglicized as Sadegh Hedayat; 1903–1951) penned the best-known example of modernist Persian prose, a short novel called Būf-i kūr (The Blind Owl) while living in Bombay in 1936. Critics writing in several languages have spilt barrels of ink attempting to make sense of the story, which presents readers with a narrative in two parts, told from the perspective of an opium-addicted pen-case painter living in squalor outside an unnamed city that may or may not be the ancient settlement of Ray, near modern Tehran, at an indeterminate time in history. This chapter briefly situates Hidāyat’s life and work within this historical moment before highlighting two relatively unexplored modernist facets of The Blind Owl: first, the elision of a key term, barzakh, from the earliest published manuscript when it was reprinted and, second, how both Hidāyat and his novel’s narrator situate themselves not between Iran and Europe but rather between Iran and India, thus redirecting our search for modernist beginnings in Persian literature.

Through a series of readings in the modernist and non-modernist Persian and Turkic verse of the twentieth-century communist East, both Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian, this chapter explores how different repertories of poetic forms modeled the transregional literary connections in which their authors and texts participated. The modernist poems discussed in this chapter are among the most famous short works of two of the Middle East’s leading modernists, Nâzım Hikmet and Nīmā Yūshīj, while the neoclassical, neoromantic, or otherwise non-modernist poems are more obscure occasional works, although their authors are important in their respective national canons: the Iranians Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī and Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the Uzbek Zulfiya Isroilova, and the Azerbaijani Samad Vurghun. This latter cluster of poems is chosen in order to show how much the geopoetics of high modernism in Persian and Turkic owed to communist poetic and rhetorical systems that were at least as ubiquitous, but which have received far less attention from Western scholars.

The introduction covers the state of modernist studies within Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures today, with reference to broader scholarship on global, transnational, and planetary modernism. It explains the logic behind the seven sections of the book: Adab, Poetry, Prose, Politics, Aesthetics, Easterlies (about connections to Urdu, Russian, and Central Asia), and Comparison. Most extant studies of modernism and modernity in the field focus on singular national contexts in the Middle East in relation to Europe and the Orientalist hangover that the region continues to suffer. Contributors to this volume instead consider instances of modernist connections in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that exist beyond Western influence and can be traced back through local channels to Arab Islamic turāth (cultural heritage) rather than to literary and artistic encounters with the West. To flesh out the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, the editor discusses major novels and films in relation to time, modernity, modernization, and modernism to begin defining the parameters of the investigations to follow.

World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the subsequent change of the empire into a republic, along with “revolutions in everyday life,” meant that from management and the legal system to clothing and the position of women, daily life had been massively transformed. Halide Edib Adıvar (1884–1964) and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) are two authors whose works responded to such drastic change. Arslan and İmşir argue in this chapter through Halide Edib’s Maskeler ve Ruhlar/Masks or Souls? and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, that these authors understood and showed that this change was beyond national borders and, with what the two world wars showed, it was all-encompassing. In other words, Edib and Tanpınar should not be read solely in order to understand the political transformations of early Republican Turkey. Their works also testify to a global transformation that they present as threatening all individuals – including the writers themselves – with the possibility of becoming machines.