Ex-position Feature Topic Call for Papers

Transgression and Irish Writing since 1921

(Guest Editors: Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin / Wei H. Kao, National Taiwan University)

Publication Date: December 2022 (Issue No. 48)

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2022

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Ever since Irish independence in 1922, Irish writers have been fascinated or troubled by how Ireland should be remembered, re-imagined, recreated or redefined. The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty ratified a border between Northern and Southern Ireland while aiming to undo the legacy of centuries of colonial domination. Freedom came at the cost of division.

In part to envisage a homeland that has turned a new chapter, and in part to prompt Irish people to have “one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass,” as James Joyce put it when publishing Dubliners, Irish writers across the generations have constructed literary or theatrical spaces where different realities are tested, disrupted, reconfigured or transformed. Their creations often problematize the past and reproduce it as an unfixed, nonlinear temporality. What was recognized as politically correct or ethically acceptable, such as community memories, heroism, authority, and historical interpretations, would turn into fluid and intertwined entities that were questioned by Irish writers, critics, and theatre practitioners.

This special issue aims to explore how modern and contemporary Irish literature and drama from 1921 to the present are reflective of changing notions of nation formation, gender values, political ideologies, and social arrangements, and how creative writers respond to or challenge the existing orthodoxies that have conditioned Irish people’s perceptions of home, place, and individuality. This issue also aims to probe how Irish writings reveal the ways in which injustice, inequality, and repression, as well as political and domestic violence, are strategically normalized, disguised or resisted through different creative methods. The contents are expected to initiate more sophisticated discussions on how Irish writers lead their readers and audiences to cross, transgress or demarcate borders, imaginary or not, and to question fixed stereotypes and cultural assumptions.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Religion
• Gender
• Patriarchy
• The family
• The rural and the urban
• New sexual Identities
• Transnationalism
• Inequality
• Domestic violence
• Post-Crash society
• Technology and modernity
• Genre and political change
• Non-fiction and autofiction