Associate Professor Marjorie Howes, of BC’s English Department and the Irish Studies program, with Claire Connolly of University College Cork, served as a general editor of Cambridge University Press’s Irish Literature in Transition. This six-volume series tracks patterns of transmission and transformation between and across the centuries of Irish literature since 1700. “I think we can by now speak of an Irish tradition’, Seamus Heaney wrote in 1977, and the international popularity of various kinds of Irish writing since then adds an even firmer sense of an achieved literary tradition. But the apparent certainty with which we now use the term “Irish literature” can blind us to its long birth across centuries of conflict and change— and to its shifting meanings in a changing present. Collectively these volumes explore questions such as the following: when did the category of Irish literature emerge, how did that happen, and what came before? How did various locations around the globe—not only in England and the United States, but in Europe, Asia, and the Southern hemisphere—contribute to the making of a body of works, processes, and practices we call Irish literature? Irish Literature in Transition seeks to capture the richness of the Irish tradition by treating it not as something fixed and past, but as a constantly moving target.
The six volumes encourage reader to think critically about the uses, strengths, and limits of a “survey,” most of which are typically organized according to single categories such as author, genre, theme, or critical approach. By combining rather than choosing one organizing category, this series suggests possible alternatives to the volumes as published— gesturing towards material that could have been included but was not because choices had to be made. Irish Literature in Transition thus seeks to retain a traditional survey’s ambition to be as inclusive as possible, but also to redefine the idea of comprehensiveness. Each volume intervenes in continuing critical conversations, charting the contours of literary history across the centuries and highlighting the significance of change as a felt, lived force.
In addition to her role as series co-editor, BC’s Marjorie Howes edited volume four of Irish Literature in Transition, which covers the crucial period of the 1916 Easter Rising and the writing of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Lady Gregory. Contributing editors of the individual volumes also include Matthew Campbell, Claire Connolly, Eric Falci, Moyra Haslett, Eve Patten and Paige Reynolds.