Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.
Introduction Margaret Kelleher and James O'Sullivan; Part I. Genealogies: 1. Print as technology: the case of the Irish language 1571–1850 Marc Caball; 2. Printing and publishing technologies: 1700–1820 Máire Kennedy; 3. The optical telegraph, the United Irish press, and Maria Edgeworth's 'White Pigeon' Joanna Wharton; 4. Technologies of sound: telephone/gramophone Chris Morash; Part II. Infrastructures: 5. Electric signs and echo chambers: the stupidity of affect in modern Irish literature Barry Sheils; 6. Literature and the technologies of radio and television Robert Savage; 7. The re-tuning of the world itself': Irish poetry on the radio Ian Whittington; Part III. Invention: 8. Technology, writing and place in medieval Irish literature Máire Ní Mhaonaigh; 9. The critique of sola scriptura in a tale of a tub and STEM in Gulliver's travels Sean Moore; 10. Technology and Irish modernism Kathryn Conrad; 11. W. B. Yeats, the revival and scientific invention Aoife Lynch; 12. James Joyce, Irish modernism and watch technology Katherine Ebury; 13. Technology, terminology and the Irish language, past and present Sharon Arbuthnot; Part IV. The Digital: 14. Irish literary feminism and its digital archive(s) Margaret Kelleher and Karen Wade; 15. Consoling machines in contemporary Irish fiction Claire Lynch; 16. 'At me too someone is looking': staging surveillance in Irish theatre Victor Merriman; 17. Technology in contemporary Irish poetry: data at 'the edge of language' Anne Karhio; 18. Irish digital literature James O'Sullivan.
Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. She is Board Member of the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), former Chair of the Board of the Irish Film Institute (IFI) and a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA). See https://people.ucd.ie/margaret.o.kelleher. James O'Sullivan lectures in digital arts and humanities at University College Cork. His publications include Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature & Literary Games (2019) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (2022). Visit jamesosullivan.org for more on his research.
