Table of Contents

[Preface: What is a Sonnet?]
Introduction: The Modern Irish Sonnet 1. The Sonnet and the ‘Irish’ writer 2. Revision and Rebellion
Chapter 1: Art and Artifice 1.1 The Sonnet as Sonnet 1.2 Writing, Speaking, and ‘The Language Issue’ 1.3 ‘Nothing beside remains’: architectural sonnets 1.4 The ‘sonnet houses’ of Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone 1.5 ‘Hereness’ and ‘thisness’ in ekphrastic sonnets 1.6 Conclusion: art, artlessness, and artifice
Chapter 2: Sonnet Sequences 2.1 Seamus Heaney’s ‘District and Circle’ sonnet cycle 2.2 Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets 2.3 Anthony Cronin’s The End of the Modern World 2.4 Conclusion: ‘psychic space’ and ‘slight returns’ in sequences from  Cronin to Muldoon
Chapter 3: Conversation 3.1 Ciaran Carson, Edmund Spenser, and The Twelfth of Never 3.2 Mary O’Malley, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and male voices 3.3 Ventriloquism: Paul Muldoon and Brendan Kennelly 3.4 Dialogue: Leontia Flynn and Paul Muldoon 3.5 Conclusion: speaking to others
Chapter 4: The Domestic 4.1 Noisy neighbours and uninvited guests 4.2 The domestic and the everyday 4.3 ‘Local rows’: the politics of the domestic 4.4 Conclusion: the familiar and the strange
Chapter 5: The Amatory Sonnet 5.1 My funny Valentine: intimacy and humour in the sonnets of Paula Meehan 5.2 The ‘passionate transitory’: Ciaran Carson’s For All We Know 5.3 Conclusion: desire, sex, and history
Conclusion 5.1 The Sonnet’s insufficiency 5.2 ‘In all the mayhem’: a chronology for the Modern Irish Sonnet?

About the Author

Tara Guissin-Stubbs is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, and the Dean of Kellogg College, Oxford University, UK. Her publications include American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: the politics of enchantment (2013) and, with Doug Haynes, Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (2017).