The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Winner of the European Society for the Study of English Book Award 2024

In the mid-1990s, Ireland was experiencing the "best of times". The Celtic Tiger seemed to instil in the national consciousness that poverty was a problem of the past. The impressive economic performance ensured that the Republic occupied one of the top positions among the world’s economic powers. During the boom, dissident voices continuously criticised what they considered to be a mirage, identifying the precariousness of its structures and foretelling its eventual crash. The 2008 recession proved them right. Throughout this time, the Irish contemporary short story expressed distrust. Enabled by its capacity to reflect change with immediacy and dexterity, the short story saw through the smokescreen created by the Celtic Tiger discourse of well-being. It reinterpreted and captured the worst and the best of the country and became a bridge connecting tradition and modernity. The major objective of this book is to analyse the interactions between fiction and reality during this period in Ireland by studying the short stories written by old and emergent voices published between the birth of the Celtic Tiger in 1995 up to its immediate aftermath in 2013.

Madalina Armie earned a master’s degree in English language and literature in 2014 from the University of Almeria. She completed her PhD on the contemporary Irish short story at the turn of the twenty-first century at the University of Almeria in 2019, for which she obtained the EIDUAL Dissertation Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation Prize in 2021 and the honorary second prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Studies for Equality and the Fight against Gender Violence of the University of Almeria in 2022. Her current areas of research include the contemporary Irish short story and Irish women’s writing. She has published articles and reviews in international journals, such as Irish Studies Review, Estudios Irlandeses, Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) and Studi Irlandesi. Armie is one of the editors of the volume Trauma, Memory and Silence of the Irish Woman in Contemporary Literature: Wounds of the Body and the Soul, also published by Routledge. She is currently teaching at the University of Almeria, Spain.

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