Irish Joy: Resistant Affects in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Irish Joy: Resistant Affects in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture examines joy and other related affective practices such as pleasure and belonging in contemporary Irish literature and culture. It seeks to correct the characterisation of Irish writing as pathologically melancholic by locating joyful noise within it. While the texts analysed are hardly utopian, they nonetheless treat joy as a politically potent force.

This argument relies on an understanding of joy as non-therapeutic; rather, taking its cues from wake culture, Irish joy can be a buoyancy that dwells with grief and becomes a locus of survival. Expressing joy can therefore be a radically resistant practice.

The book also borrows Spinoza’s definition of joy as “emergent capacity”: becoming capable of new things, especially in tandem with others, and nurturing enabling ways of being together. In other words, joy can marshal collective action rather than simply being atomisingly self-indulgent.

In the chapters herein, the author examines literature from both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. This examination comments on the complex interleavings of joy and grief in contemporary Ireland, highlighting how this affective landscape can foster community, spur political action, and crucially, in Ross Gay’s words, become a “practice of survival” for the island’s most marginalised populations.