Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee (New Directions in Irish & Irish American Literature)

Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature argues that the outskirts of cities have become spaces for a new literature beyond boundaries of traditional notions of nation, class, and gender.  These new constructions of dwellings and neighborhoods house new notions of the roles of women in the working class, a reconception paralleled by the use of the sorts of textual innovations once presumed to be the territory of metropolitan elites. Chapters on James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee examine appropriations of voice, shifts in narrative perspective, and strategic uses of local vernacular as techniques that characterize the explosion of working-class literary production in Scotland and Ireland in the eighties and nineties.