This original and innovative book proposes dismemory as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeares early modern English influence.
The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespearemodern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlets hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Becketts Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeatss poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterising the relationship as dismemorial, the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which modern/contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeares England.
