ABSTRACT
This book engages with ageing masculinities in Irish literature and visual culture, including fiction, drama, poetry, painting, and documentary. Exploring the shifting representations of older men from the early twentieth century to the present, the contributors analyse how a broad range of literary and visual texts construct, reinscribe, or challenge perceptions of older age. In doing so, they trace a shift from depictions of authority figures - often symbolising patriarchal dominance and oppression - to more nuanced, complex, and heterogeneous explorations of older men’s embodied subjectivities and vulnerabilities. Exploring artists and writers such as Seán Keating, J.M. Synge, Teresa Deevy, Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Kate O’Brien, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Mike McCormack, Anne Griffin, and Claire Keegan, the chapters in this book attend to the symbolic as well as social significance of older men in Irish cultural expression.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|46 pages
Drama
chapter 2|16 pages
Taking the “Black Stick”
chapter 3|12 pages
“Are All the Monks Old Men?”
chapter 4|16 pages
Father Ireland on Stage
part II|46 pages
Poetry
chapter 5|14 pages
Poetics at the Limit
chapter 7|15 pages
Not Sailing to Byzantium
part III|98 pages
Fiction
chapter 8|14 pages
“That the Youth May Throw Us Aside”
chapter 9|14 pages
Stuck in the Old Times
chapter 10|14 pages
Uncanny Reflections
chapter 11|15 pages
“Caught Suddenly by the Land Shifting”
chapter 12|15 pages
“A Bridge to Nowhere”
chapter 13|12 pages
“Shades of Masculinity”
part IV|43 pages
Visual Culture