Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction: Magnitudes of Telling

This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland, analysing the production, dissemination, and reception of the short form in the twenty-first century, and reading contemporary short stories in their many configurations and guises. This volume covers twenty-five years of Irish writing, beginning in late 1997 with the establishment of the innovative literary periodical The Stinging Fly, and concludes in 2022. The book is structured in five parts, with each part focusing on a particular mode of publication: periodicals, single-author volumes, short-story cycles, edited anthologies, and small or independent presses. Each part includes a series of case studies while also engaging with a diverse range of short-story criticism and theory, both comparative and Irish-centered. Anthologisation and Irish Short Fiction brings different writers at distinct stages of their careers into conversation, and This volume aims to illuminate the contemporaneous value of this body of work, its innovative and varied use, and the diversity of its practice. Particular attention is also shown to the fluidity of the short form, to its capacity to disrupt and arrest, and to its progressive, writerly potential.

Paul Delaney is Associate Professor in the School of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He is author of Seán O’Faoláin: Literature, Inheritance and the 1930s (2014) and co-editor, with Adrian Hunter, of The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English (2019); he is also editor of Reading Colm Tóibín (2008) and William Trevor: Revaluations, with Michael Parker (2013). He gained his PhD from the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent (Canterbury), where he was a British Council Chevening Scholar.