Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Idleness

In this book, Dobbins argues that the cultural politics of Irish modernism lie precisely in its engagement with the concept of idleness. He contends that the representation of what exactly the intellectual does, or rather, what exactly the intellectual does not do, became a preoccupation within the line of Irish modernist novels initiated by the publication of Ulysses -- that an emphasis upon the representation of idleness, even the suggestion that idleness might stand in for innovative forms of creative work, prevails in the Irish modernist texts. Idleness, he argues, signifies dissent from the ongoing project of the work of the nation.