Technology in Irish Literature and Culture

This volume explores how technology has influenced both the form and content of Irish writing.

Margaret Kelleher (Edited by), James O'Sullivan (Edited by)

9781009182874, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 2023

400 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.66 kg

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.

Introduction Margaret Kelleher and James O'Sullivan
Part I. Genealogies: 1. Print as technology: the case of the Irish language 1571–1850 Marc Caball
2. Printing and publishing technologies: 1700–1820 Máire Kennedy
3. The optical telegraph, the United Irish press, and Maria Edgeworth's 'White Pigeon' Joanna Wharton
4. Technologies of sound: telephone/gramophone Chris Morash
Part II. Infrastructures: 5. Electric signs and echo chambers: the stupidity of affect in modern Irish literature Barry Sheils
6. Literature and the technologies of radio and television Robert Savage
7. The re-tuning of the world itself': Irish poetry on the radio Ian Whittington
Part III. Invention: 8. Technology, writing and place in medieval Irish literature Máire Ní Mhaonaigh
9. The critique of sola scriptura in a tale of a tub and STEM in Gulliver's travels Sean Moore
10. Technology and Irish modernism Kathryn Conrad
11. W. B. Yeats, the revival and scientific invention Aoife Lynch
12. James Joyce, Irish modernism and watch technology Katherine Ebury
13. Technology, terminology and the Irish language, past and present Sharon Arbuthnot
Part IV. The Digital: 14. Irish literary feminism and its digital archive(s) Margaret Kelleher and Karen Wade
15. Consoling machines in contemporary Irish fiction Claire Lynch
16. 'At me too someone is looking': staging surveillance in Irish theatre Victor Merriman
17. Technology in contemporary Irish poetry: data at 'the edge of language' Anne Karhio
18. Irish digital literature James O'Sullivan.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]