Description
Book SynopsisThis original and engaging study explores the way in which Colm Tóibín repeatedly identifies and disrupts the boundaries between personal and political or social histories in his fiction. Through this collapsing of boundaries, he examines the cost of broader political exclusions and considers how personal and political narratives shape individual subjects.
Each of Tóibín’s novels is comprehensively addressed here, as are his non-fiction works, reviews, plays, short stories, and some as-yet-unpublished work. The book situates Tóibín not only within his contemporary literary milieu, but also within the contexts of the Irish literary tradition, contemporary Irish politics, Irish nationalism, and theories of psychology, gender, nationalism, and postcolonialism.
Trade Review«Costello-Sullivan’s meticulous research and extensive bibliography will be valuable to any scholar studying Tóibín’s writing, and her thought-provoking interpretations of his novels will generate lively critical discussions.» (Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt, New Hibernia Review 17, 2013/3)
«Much work has been done by feminists working in Irish Studies, by scholars exploring LGBTQ literary and cultural studies in the Irish context [...]; Mother/Country is, to my knowledge, the most probing and developed such exploration to date.»
(Margot Backus, Irish Literary Supplement 2016)
Table of ContentsContents: ‘Like Being in Another Country’: Doubled Narratives of Nation and Self in
The South – Politics and the Lost Mother(s) in
The Heather Blazing – ‘Hiding from the Other Side’: Politics and Sexuality in
The Story of the Night – ‘Nothing Secret, Nothing Held Inside’: Narrating Absence and Trauma in
The Blackwater Lightship – ‘A Great Withholding’: Fictive (Auto)Biography and the Primacy of Art in
The Master – ‘She Would Have to Go Back’: Emigration and the Portability of Culture in Brooklyn.
