We have seen that audiences import conversational implicatures from what authors and narrators explicitly say, just as we fluently recognize that fictional characters conversationally implicate things to each other. I begin this chapter by showing that this process relies on background information in the form of supporting assumptions. I then go on to discuss a final category of background information that I call default inferences. We will see that while supporting assumptions are mandatorily imported but not mandatorily generated, default inferences are optional in both senses.

Evangelical Christianity gave Phillis the means, motive, and opportunity to become a poet. She was writing poetry by 1765, a mere four years after she arrived in America. The poems she wrote in the next few years display an almost incredibly rapid improvement in her skills in versification. As a recently converted “Ethiop” she assumes the role of a lay preacher. Phillis experimented with various literary forms, such as allegory, as well as with rhyme patterns besides the rhymed couplets she uses in almost all her later poems. In response to the growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies during the 1760s, Phillis began writing overtly political poems, creating what I call a proto-national American voice. Phillis’s persona alternates between identifying as African and as American in Phillis’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770. She uses the occasion to address contemporaneous religious and political issues. Republication of her elegy brought Phillis transatlantic recognition.

‘Eighteenth-Century Irish Publishers and Readers’ traces the book trade in Ireland in the eighteenth century. A pivotal legal aspect of this trade was the Copyright Act of 1709, which was not ratified in Ireland, thus allowing Irish printers to publish English works without paying royalties to the authors. This led to a proliferation of printing, particularly of works by English writers, and a new, if modest, prosperity enlarged the potential readership in the latter part of the century. The predominant themes of the new fictions published by these Irish publishers were the defence of and assaults on female virtue, escapades of ramblers and rogues, contested inheritances, heroism, and sacrifice. As in Britain, so in Ireland, a progression through the sentimental, novels of sensibility, the picaresque, the supernatural, Gothic, oriental, and outlandish can be traced, moving towards new forms of national and regional fiction by the end of the century.

‘Contemporary Irish Popular Fiction’ considers a genre of writing sometimes characterised as ‘chick-lit’ (a disputed term), women’s fiction (equally problematical), or popular women’s fiction, which now constitutes one of the largest and fastest-growing genres of Irish writing. Beginning with the emergence of Maeve Binchy as an internationally successful novelist in the 1990s, a succession of Irish writers – Patricia Scanlan, Cecelia Ahern, Sinéad Moriarty, Marian Keyes, Emer McLysaght, and Sarah Breen – have produced work that has not only been hugely popular with readers, but which has also addressed key issues in contemporary Irish society, including abortion, divorce, gender roles, aging, and housing. It is demonstrated that the familiar tropes and situations deployed in novels in this genre allow scope to address these issues. Ultimately, it is argued, this genre of popular fiction has been among the most successful in addressing the changing nature of Irish society.

‘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.

‘The Irish-Language Novel, 1980–2024’ is the fourth in a chronological sequence of chapters in the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel tracing the development of the novel in the Irish language. From the second half of the twentieth century, Irish-language fiction moved away from its initial connections with a largely rural, traditional, and oral-based culture, to embrace multicultural, multilingual global settings, often in negotiation with the past. For example, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin’s Madame Lazare (2021) uncovers the history of a character who is an Irish-speaking Estonian Jew and, as such, can be seen as paradigmatic. This freedom from the dominant concerns of earlier Irish-language fiction can also be noted in the rise of Irish-language genre fiction, particularly crime fiction and political thrillers, which have become an important form of social commentary. Likewise, the interrogation of the past has given rise to a new wave of historical fiction, such as Alan Titley’s An Bhean Feasa (2014).

‘The National Tale’ argues that we ought to consider the national tale to be a mode, rather than a genre, in that the former can operate across genres and forms (literary and non-literary). From this perspective, the national tale is a literary mode in which problems of national identity and political sovereignty are narrativised in a form that produces a solution. The intermarriage of coloniser and colonised that is found in national tales in the romance mode, notably those of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and especially her Wild Irish Girl (1806), provides a familiar instance. Equally, there are national tales that function within the genres of the historical novel and of the Gothic novel. Across these generic forms, the national tale often encodes a resistance to the modern nation-state but, in so doing, exposes the impossibility of solving the problems of sovereignty and autonomy that they identify.

‘John Banville, Art and Genre’ traces the work of one of Ireland’s most significant novelists since the early 1970s, John Banville. It reads backwards from the point at which Banville, a determinedly literary writer, began writing genre fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black in 2006, with his novel Christine Falls. However, Banville’s works, from early novels such as Nightspawn (1971), were from the beginning concerned with the exhaustion of literary form, and this can be traced through the science tetralogy, the art trilogy (beginning with the Book of Evidence, 1989), and the Cleave trilogy in the early 2000s. Hence, when Banville declared his 2022 novel, The Singularities, to be his last (even though it has since been followed by more genre fiction), it could be argued that this statement of finality is really only a continuation of a sense of fallibility and inevitable failure present in all his fiction.

‘Irish Science Fiction’ considers a genre not often associated with an Irish novelistic tradition, science fiction, by focusing on the work of two Belfast authors: James White and Bob Shaw. Both authors began by publishing their work in science fiction magazines. White’s major contribution to the genre has been the Sector General series, set on a vast intergalactic space station, but he has also written stand-alone novels, including The Dream Millennium (1976) and Underkill (1979), both set in a violent, dystopian future Belfast. Likewise, while Shaw has written a number of individual novels, he is best known for his two trilogies, Orbitsville (1975–90) and Land and Overland (1986–9), which can be read, on one level, as parables of colonisation. The careers of both writers overlap with that of Ian McDonald, whose Irish trilogy (1991–6) uses future worlds to reflect on events such as the War of Independence and the Troubles.

The conclusion sums up the book’s argument and introduces various new working-class authors and their use of the literary genre of unemployment.

Martin Amis’s first three fictional works both embody and illuminate his complicated relationship and attitude to genre. In all three – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success – Amis appropriates existing genres or genre tropes while eluding many of their strictures. He does so by employing distinctly postmodern narrative strategies (unreliable narrators, intertextuality, metafictional asides, parody, pastiche) that emphasise the subjective nature of reality and destabilise traditional ideas of identity and agency. The resulting hybrid fictions blur boundaries not only between genres but between individuals and the cultural discourses that shape their consciousness.

Contemporary poets in Ireland have taken a number of formal and stylistic paths, many of which fall somewhere within the baggy ambit of the “well-made poem” and the general bounds of lyric poetry. However, this has not yielded a homogenous or monolithic set of strategies. This chapter offers an account of the particular formal, generic, and compositional forces that impel contemporary Irish poetry.

Some of the most remarkable early Irish poetry appears within prose texts, whether Sweeney’s pellucid nature poems in Buile Suibhne [The Madness of Sweeney], the lengthy lyrics in Fingal Rónáin, or the knotty roscad that appear in Táin Bó Cúailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge/Cooley]. A number of legal, historical, and genealogical texts are also characterized by prosimetric structures, perhaps most famously the Lebor Gabála Érenn [The Book of the Takings of Ireland]. This chapter studies the role of verse within prose works, examining its formal characteristics, generic investments, and rhetorical functions.

Written over a period of five decades (1973–2013), Peter Maxwell Davies’s ten symphonies occupy a central position in his output. Having established a reputation in the 1960s as the ‘enfant terrible’ of British music, chiefly as a result of a number of radical music-theatre works, the appearance of a ‘Symphony’ in the following decade surprised critics. Yet Davies was long attracted to the abstract qualities of the genre – an interest deepened by his move to Hoy, Orkney, in the early 1970s. This chapter considers how landscape, place and the natural world, issues of form and genre, the symphonic legacy of Sibelius and Mahler, and architecture – especially the works of Brunelleschi and Borromini – shaped these symphonies. It argues that acknowledging and appreciating the symphonies from these multiple musical and extra-musical perspectives can illuminate the richness of the composer’s symphonic imagination.