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Christopher Cusack et al. eds., "The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature" (Liverpool UP, 2026)
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Bridget English
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Matthew Reznicek
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Helen Pennett
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Helen Pennett
welcome to the New
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Matthew Reznicek
Books Network
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Helen Pennett
hello and welcome to New Books Network. My name is Helen Pennett and I'm one of the co hosts of the channel Today. I'm delighted to be talking to Bridget English I and Matthew Reznicek. Bridget is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She's the author of Laying out the Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel and co editor of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism. She's currently working on a book on Irish modernism, mental illness, and Institutions of Care. Matthew Rezicek is Associate professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota. He's published widely on 18th and 19th century British and Irish literature and the intersection of health and disability. He's co editor of the Irish bulldungsroman, which regular listeners to the podcast may remember him talking to me about, and his second monograph, Tales of Health, Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale, is forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. I'm delighted to be talking talking to them today about the edited collection the Corpse in Modern Irish Literature, which was published in 2026 with Liverpool University Press with a third co editor, Christopher Cusack, who couldn't be with us today. But Bridget, Matthew, you could. Thank you so much for joining me. So can I maybe start by asking you both to introduce Yourselves. Briefly, Bridget, if I could start with you. Yeah.
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Bridget English
Hi, I'm Bridget English. I work in Modernism and Irish Studies, and I'm currently working a lot in the field of health humanities, particularly histories of mental institutions in Ireland.
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Helen Pennett
Ah, that's a big topic.
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Matthew Reznicek
And, Matthew, like you said, Helen, I'm Matthew Rastenchek. I teach in the medical school at the University of Minnesota. My monograph actually just came out last month, and so it is now available at Liverpool. And I work on medical and health humanities in the long 18th and 19th century, thinking mostly at the moment kind of about care and the Gothic.
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Helen Pennett
Fantastic. That talks a lot to your chapter and to some of the other chapters in the book that we're going to be talking about. So it does make sense. Maybe I could stay with you, Matthew, just for a moment while you tell us how the book came about, how you came to work on it together, and so on.
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Matthew Reznicek
Yeah, so this is. This book has a very weird online origin. It started actually as a tweet, just saying, you know, someone should think about a collection on dead bodies and corpses in Irish literature. I honestly don't remember what I was reading at the moment that prompted, you know, the outburst online. But Chris Cusack and then Amy Walsh both responded as like, yes, this is something we should start. Like, we should seriously think about. And so we began putting together the proposal, the call for papers, all these sorts of things. Bridget, thankfully, came on as the third editor with all of her expertise in the area, and the book took off from there.
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Helen Pennett
It's a great origin story. I don't know if there are a lot of books that start that way. You could try it again if you have another. Another good. Another good idea. So you had the Gulf papers and you started receiving contributions. Bridget, would you like to tell us a little bit about how the book ended up being structured?
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Bridget English
Yeah. So, I mean, we kind of were aiming to. It was kind of a combination of people that we knew that were working in the area, and also the fact that we wanted to cover as broad a historical range as we could in a way that made sense. And we also wanted to make sure that we had a variety of genres, from poetry and fiction and novels, as well as drama and Irish language in particular. So that was sort of. I think, as anyone who's edited a collection knows, there's a certain amount of soliciting papers that goes on with trying to represent that vast a time period and also that many genres, because we got really. In the end, I think we got really lucky in terms of the number of contributors that we have who are experts in their field. And then also the idea of the corpse, I guess, is broad enough, but also specific enough that it can seem intimidating if someone's like, hey, can you write something about a corpse? Which sounds really morbid and sort of off putting. But luckily we got a really interesting combination of comic and Gothic and the national tale and elegies and graveyard poetry, modernist novels, revivalist writing, auto fiction. So it's really like the great thing about, I think the collection is there's something in there for anyone or everyone in terms of students and other scholars as well. And then in terms of organization, I think it was something we struggled a little bit with in terms of we didn't just want to organize it chronologically because we thought that there would be more interesting connections to be made and sort of new points of contact and maybe unexpected connections if we didn't organize it that way. And I think even though the first section, I guess, which I think Matt will speak to more in a second, is I guess still the earliest time period in terms of late 18th and 19th century. But we wanted to organize around the idea of reframing the corpse in terms of other points of reframing genres like graveyard poetry, the Gothic and the national tale, which are represented in those categories. And then the other sections, revitalizing the Corpse, Familial Corpses, the non Quiet Remains, are more, I guess like thematic, but then also sort of more conceptual in terms of the things of the concepts that the chapters represented. So I think it works really well in terms of maybe making connections between chapters that readers wouldn't normally see for
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Helen Pennett
sure, because there is a sort of very broadly chronological structure. But then all of the chapters do speak to each other on different levels as well. So I think that worked out. That worked out really well and I imagine that was quite difficult to organize. But as you said, it's structured into sort of four sections after the introduction, which the three of you co wrote. So Reframing the Corpse, Revitalising the corpse, Familial corpses, and then unquiet Remains. So as you suggested, Brigid, I'm going to turn to you, Matthew, for the first part, Reframing the Corpse. We have three chapters. The chapters deal mainly with texts from the late 18th and early 19th centuries and explore how the dead body is used to ask questions about genre. As you mentioned, identity and power. We've got a different genre in each chapter. Graveyard poetry, the Gothic and the national tale. And this section does include your own chapter, which is entitled Between Epidemic and Endemic Deaths, Death and the State in the Wild Irish Girl. So maybe you'd like to tell us about your own chapter and also mention the other two chapters in the section to give our listeners a reader of what they'll discover.
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Matthew Reznicek
So what I found so fascinating about this section on rereading it was it really sort of underscores the transnational element of Irish literature, especially in this period. You know, Colleen English's chapter on graveyard poetry begins from a recognition of an English tradition that actually is rooted in Scotland and in Ireland, and traces that through lesser known Irish poets, one of whom is an early Ulster weaver poet, James Orr. And so you get this really interesting reconfiguration of. Of the graveyard poetry, which has kind of come to be seen as like, quintessentially English through a very, very important Irish tradition. And Colleen does this phenomenal job of tying it through forms of sympathy that she connects both obviously to Adam Smith and the theory of Moral sentiments, but also to sort of an important historicist understanding of the legal implications around funerary rights. Who was allowed to be buried, where, what sort of rites were allowed to be performed? And so it does this really interesting work of recovering a tradition and situating it in this legal framework. So it helps us think about the corpse as a site of literary voice, literary memory, ethical sympathy, and legal consequences. That those threads, I think, actually permeate the entire collection because it shows the involvement of the state and culture and philosophy. And so Colleen's chapter, I think, is a really phenomenal beginning piece. Then we turn to Christina Morin's chapter on comic corpses in the Gothic. And what, characteristically of Tina's writing, she's. She writes so easily about such a broad range of texts, but focuses on kind of two lesser known Irish Gothic writers who have kind of competing ideas around the role of the corpse and how it defines the bounds of the Gothic. Playing largely with Anne Radcliffe's distinction between terror and horror, Tina kind of pulls apart kind of competing notions of the corpse as horrific or terrifying. And that's really based in the degree to which the corpse is represented. These are novels that, as she says, allow us to think through the construction of the Gothic canon based on what's excluded versus what's included. And so again, the. The corpse becomes this site for reframing national transnational traditions as well as the. The shaping of literary history. And then we turn to my chapter on modes of death and the construction of medical authority. So it kind of takes its beginning from this line in FOUCAULT about the distinction between an epidemic and an endemic form of death. And the epidemic is associated with sort of suddenness, randomness, illegibility. An endemic death becomes measured, calculated, expected, and, and tied to the emergence of statistics and biopolitics. And the chapter really focuses on the representation of the death of the Prince of Inishmore in Sidney Owenson's the Wild Irish Girl, and offers two competing readings, arguing that the novel doesn't quite resolve which mode of death best explains the ending. And in some ways that that irresolution allows us to kind of sit in the murkiness or the anxiety over medical authority and the emergence of the state, as well as the anxiety that shapes the corpse in broader socio cultural discourse.
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Helen Pennett
Fantastic. That's a great overview of that first section. I'm going to stay with you for the second section, Revitalizing the Corpse, which hints at the connection between the corpse and the project of cultural revival. And this connection is relevant for all four chapters in the section, starting by looking at folklore and the revivalist drama of Synge. Then we've got a chapter on Irish language poetry and then the novels of Kate o'. Brien. And this was probably the only chapter I'd anticipated when I saw the title of the collection was the Almost Inevitable Chapter about the Corpse of Father Flynn from Joyce's the Sisters. I say inevitably, but Lloyd Maeve Houston's chapter has a really interesting new take on what is probably the best known corpse in Irish literature, as do indeed all of the chapters in. In this section. What can readers expect? Matthew?
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Matthew Reznicek
Well, it's funny, Lloyd Maeve Houston does call Flynn's corpse the corpse past, which almost every study of modernism must process. And so it is in some ways both expected and unexpected. And it's funny, both Bridget and I, I think, were very hopeful and expect. We very much expected a chapter on corpses and Kate o'. Brien. And so I think it's interesting to know sort of which authors become expected in this discourse. And so, yeah, I'll start kind of at the beginning with Michael McAteer's chapter, which traces the corpse from Douglas Hyde's translation buff translation transliteration from Irish folklore into Singh's dramas, and really beginning with this fascinating kind of meditation on the usefulness or lack of usefulness of the corpse in Georges Bataille's writing as a way of thinking about religion and the relationship between religion and the state, religion and national culture. And so McAteer does this really phenomenal job of tracing the presence of the corpse as not quite Living, not quite dead in Hyde's story, Tag. Okay, and the Corpse, which deals with this young boy, young man who is out one night and is confronted by a stream of little people carrying a dead body, who foist the corpse on him and tell him that he must bury the corpse in one of these locations, whichever feels the most doable. And so he spends the night going around from place to place, trying to inter the corpse. But each place he goes is the grave is already occupied, and the corpse kind of sits up and says, essentially, no room in the inn. Like, keep moving. And so he finally finds an Irish graveyard that has room for it, a freshly dug grave with an open casket ready for the corpse. And so this spurs McAteer to think about the place of the corpse, especially the presence of the corpse at the end and beginning of two Sing plays, the Riders to the Sea, and then in the Shadow of the Glen. No. Yes. Yeah, yeah, in the Shadow with Glenn. Just wanted to make sure. And what becomes really fascinating is the cultural response to the presence of the dead body on the stage. And the dead body is mostly not present until the very end in writers. But the critique at the time, as McAteer notes, was that it was on stage for too long. In some ways, it was too real in writers, and that threatened the boundary of this order, of the social order. And then similarly, kind of the flip side of the coin is that the treatment of the corpse in the Shadow of the Glen is too comic. Singh is using it to make fun of the local culture, especially in Wicklow and all these things. And so the corpus functions irresolutely. It's either too serious, too tragic, or it's too comic. And it speaks to just this anxiety about staging the corpse, which will come back in Jose Lanters chapter later, in Daniela Tienova's chapter on the corpse and Irish language poetry, especially from the mid 20th century to the contemporary, she traces this phenomenal tradition where there's an attempt to talk about the Irish language as being always already dead or on the verge of dying. And in Irish language poetry, that trope becomes a mode of critique or of kind of response. Beginning with Newla Nagono's essay why I Chose to Write in Irish, the Corpse that Sits up and Talks Back, this chapter kind of traces a slew of instances where Irish language poets, Sean O'Reardon, Alvin Agarvi, speak to. And through these meditations on dead bodies, I was especially struck reading it again about the Orirodon poems, where he's staring into the grave, but the view is slightly. Always obstructed. There's a little robin that has a better view of the grave itself. And so it's really a phenomenal kind of way of thinking about the positionality of minority languages and the threat of their disappearance. And so the corpse becomes this place not only of recovery, but of a recognition of the forces that push us towards the grave. And then we have Maggie Margaret o' Neill's chapter on corpses and Kate o'. Brien. What I found so fascinating about this chapter, obviously it begins with. With the Anteroom, which is the. The novel most associated with the corpse, and o' Brien's oeuvre, which essentially is a three. It's a novel split over three days, dealing with the imminent and yet never yet happening death of. Of the matriarchal figure. But then the novel, the argument shifts to o' Brien's the Land of Spices, which is her. Her second novel that's banned. And what. What Mackie does that's really fascinating is shift the argument around the type of development that the corpse enables. So shifting from the classical Bildungsroman through the development of the self, essentially through youth. Maggie articulates this. This argument in favor for Reifungsromann or like the development through death, and uses it to parallel the development of Anna Murphy and the Reverend Mother Marie Helene in the Land of Spices, centered around the crisis of Anna's younger brother's death with this unbelievably traumatic moment that creates this sort of psychic and spiritual rupture for Anna Murphy that actually brings the Reverend Mother much more involved emotionally into Anna's life towards the latter third of the novel. So it becomes this really fascinating sort of generic formal argument that stems from this fleeting presence of the corpse. And then lastly, we have Lloyd Maeve Houston's chapter on Joyce, the Corpse of Father Flynn, and what Houston recognizes as. As an anachronistic use of the idea of sexual health. But this really important argument that I think positions the governmentality, the biopolitics of sex and health through this liminal figure of the corpse. Liminal and also, as you said, central. Right. Like it is the sexual corpse in. In Irish modernism. And so thinking about the ways that this diseased dead corpse reveals moral complaints, social complaints, as well as colonial structures and the imposition of. Of sexual laws, laws that govern sex and health through the colonial infrastructure, provides this really important way of rereading Dubliners and the anxieties contained therein. So it's a really phenomenal section that again, as you said, largely moves chronologically but isn't precisely chronological and, more importantly, points to all these kinds of reframings.
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Helen Pennett
Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking us through those those four really, really interesting chapters that takes us onto our third part, Familial Corpses. So this one contains two chapters by editors of the volume, so yours, Bridget, entitled Collapsing Flesh and Wasted Maternal Corpses and Septic Irish Modernism. And also a chapter on Post Celtic Tiger fiction by Christopher Cusack and then a third chapter by Kathleen Costa o' Sullivan on During a Grief as a Ghost in the Throat. So here we have chapters on the maternal corpse, on the paternal corpse, and on the connection between The Corpse and the corpus, which is discussed in Negro for Ghost Text, Obviously, from the title of the section of what I've just said, what all three chapters have in common is the Family and how the corpse can have the subversive power to expose patriarchal structures within the family and beyond. Bridget, would you like to talk us through your chapter and the two other chapters in this section?
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Bridget English
Yes, thanks. As you mentioned, the whole idea of familial corpses, I think, is really important in Irish literature. And a really prominent trope, especially the death of the mother, but then obviously the death of the father as well. You have a lot of particularly modern, or I guess, contemporary and kind of postmodernist Irish novels focusing a lot on parental corpses that are, like, still hanging around the house even though they're deceased. Like, I think always of Patrick McCabe's novel the Butcher Boy, in which the mother's corpse is in the living room because her child doesn't really know. Oh, sorry, it's the father's corpse, I think, in the living room because he doesn't really know what to do with it. And then obviously, Sarah Baum's spill, simmer, fault or wither, you have the father's corpse upstairs. So I think the parental corpse becomes this structure on which a lot of narratives are built because it's such a defining moment in the protagonist's life in ways that other corpses, I think, or other bodies. Other deaths don't quite function in the same way. Even though they may be really profound losses. They aren't as tied to the notion of origins and identity as the parental corpse. So that's the focus of this section. My chapter takes up the maternal corpse, I guess, rightly, like, fitting for the beginning of the section with the origins of life and the mother. And I guess I started with thinking about the idea of Mother Ireland and the politics attached to the nationalist idea of construction of Mother Ireland. And then the ways that modernist novels, the modernist novels that I'm writing about in this chapter really deconstruct or dismantle those associations. And I was particularly shocked by the use of the word septic that ended up appearing, I think, in all of the novels except one. So this idea of association with mother's corpse with rot. And then I found all these really interesting connections to puerperal sepsis, which is a leading cause of death in the 20th century, which is an infection that occurs after childbirth and results in, like, systemic death of the mother. And then I found other links to the idea of septic systems themselves. And the waste disposal in Ireland in the 20th century, particularly related to Ulysses and the idea of wastewater and waste as something that is like. Joyce loves his circular ideas of birth and death being wrapped up together. And the idea of wastewater as something that, in a certain way, I guess I'm playing around with the word septic a bit in terms of septic as something that needs to be disposed of and gotten rid of, but then also the idea of septic things kind of breaking down their own waste and serving as a kind of regenerative place as well. So in that chapter, I talk about Joyce's Ulysses with relation to the mother, and then Kate o' Brien's the Anteroom. So circling back to some of Margaret and o' Neill's points, but really seeing the notion of septic and the way the mother's death, or the imminent mother's death, who never actually dies in the novel, is an impetus or something that provokes change in Agnes's life and the way that her love affair with her sister's husband, Vincent, really becomes septic, or like she calls it, a septic wound that cannot heal, which is contrasted with this other Dr. Curran, who's in love with her, who is seen as like a curative figure, but she doesn't love him. So there's that contrast. And then tracing that kind of through the modernist period a little bit through the Elizabeth Bowen's the House in Paris. And the way that the dying, I guess, kind of matriarchal figure, Madame Fisher's body, who is lying dying upstairs, provokes this return to the past, or an re evaluation of the past of the characters in the novel and the way that her death sort of poisons, but also calls for a kind of new life in the story, or leaves, I guess, the future open, at least to the children, because the focus in that novel is so much on the two children who are there and the ways that they have to reconcile with the past in order to open their future. And then I can freeze it through probably one of the best death scenes in Irish fiction, which is in Aidan Higgins Balcony of Europe, which is not really a novel about death and doesn't really have that many corpses in it. But it's a really interesting opening scene with the mother's death, the main character's mother's death, who's dying in a hospital for, I guess, a period of a couple of a week or a couple of weeks. And he keeps having these moments where she seems dead, but then he realizes she's just, like, joking around as he says, and she's not actually dying, she's not actually dead, and she's attended by all these nurses, nuns who are also nurses, who he describes as being like mushrooms. So it's really fascinating. It was really fascinating to think about the ways that. That even though it's not the same septic idea, but more of an idea of kind of regenerative growth through death and particularly through a kind of organic death. So moving on from there, I think that Chris Cusack's chapter on post Celtic Tiger fiction takes up some of those concerns, but through the idea, at least with the reconciling the corpse as an impetus to reconcile with the past, through the idea of the paternal corpse and the connection with the Celtic Tiger and the way that the paternal corpse forces this reconciliation with the. Or I guess reckoning rather than reconciliation with the past. So this notion of like kind of bodily entanglement with historical legacy through the paternal corpse and the ways that that's associated with the peculiar temporalities of capitalism in Celtic Tiger Ireland. So he analyzes in a really fascinating way 3 post Celtic Tiger novels, Donald Ryan's the Spinning Heart, Keland Hughes is the Wild Laughter, and Clara Kilroy's the Devil I Know, and examines how the underlying references to the famine, because Chris is a fantastic famine scholar, so how references to the famine inform those narratives of kind of social collapse as a result of the Celtic Tiger. And I think one of the things that Chris's chapter does extraordinarily well is focus on the way that the paternal corpse opens a space for negotiation between political and social issues, particularly the social effects of the financial crisis and neoliberalism. So without going into just a critique, I think Chris's chapter is. Opens a more neutral space that I think a lot of scholarship doesn't always do is thinking about how to move forward from that, rather than just being a critique of neoliberalism or capitalism. And then we kind of return to the maternal with Kathleen Casella Sullivan's chapter, which really draws in fascinating ways the question of authorship, and particularly women, I think takes of women's authorship is negotiated in the literary sphere and I think takes up a lot of the earlier feminist concerns. But bringing in through during Negro's A Ghost in the Throat brings in women's experience of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and motherhood, and her engagement with Eileen du Naganl's poetic lament, the Keen for Art o'. Leary. So I think that what Castella Silvan does extraordinarily well is reviving this Kind of playful tension between, as you mentioned, I think, in the introduction, the literary corpus, as in body work, and the actual physical remains of the person, which is all seen in, initially in the Keen for Art o', Leary, in terms of the ways of the words, can sort of reconstruct, or an attempt to reconstruct through language, a body or physical remains. So I think she brings up a lot of really interesting questions about female authorship and the way that that can be marginalized through the literary marketplace and bringing, really, the idea of the corpse, but the body and the actual, like, embodied experiences to the fore. Yeah. So that's section three. That's right. Yep. Yeah,
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Helen Pennett
yeah. Yes, that's true. There were. There were just three chapters. And in that section, thank you very much for talking us through the different chapters there. The final section, which does have four chapters on quiet remains, deals with texts which present us with disruptive corpses. So first we've got two chapters which deal with theatre, one with the theatre of Marina Karr, and then with the various Irish takes on Antigone, which foreground the power of the state police, the usually female body. And then the final two chapters deal with problematic burial with two sort of different aspects of that. Firstly, the burial in unconsecrated ground of unbaptized babies or baptized babies, as the chapter discusses in the chapter on Mary Leland's the Killeen. And finally then the problematic absence of a body, which is the case with the disappeared from the Troubles, which is discussed in a chapter on David Parks, the Truth Commissioner. Again, Bridget, I'd come to you to talk us through this section, if that's all right.
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Bridget English
Yes, thanks. Yes. So this section, as you mentioned, focuses on unquiet remains. So the idea, I guess, of. Brings in more of the idea of haunting and the influences that the corpses are still exerting on the living even after their bodies have been buried or disappeared. And the ways that those that the dead, instead of just demanding care, are also demanding attention, a call for action and sort of the corpse as a figure of like that prompts social justice action. So not just horrifying or frightening, but the ways that corpses are more subversive and the way that they might have the potential to shape social reality. So Jose Lanter's chapter on Marina, cars on Rafferty's Hill and Ariel brings the fore in really, I think, graphic and sometimes troubling ways. The disruptive corpses and the. The graphic and disturbing aspects of the dead in Marina Carr's work. And Lancers argues that Kara's over is famous for these female protagonists who are struggling against patriarchal structures that construct their future, but are also struggling with their own complicity and participation in those structures. So the. The rotting bodies in those plays are not just like metonyms for the deconstructing social order, but they're ways of highlighting the necessity for social justice and the struggle for that justice. So I think that Lanzer's chapter really does that especially well in terms of grappling with those really troubling corpses. And in a similar way, Kennedy's chapter, Shanice Kennedy's chapter, which is next in the volume, is also focused on drama. But in this chapter she's concerned particularly with the reimaginings of Sophocles, Antigone and the, I think four or five reimaginings, particularly Tom Pollan's the Ride Act, Brandon Kennelly's Antigone A New Version, Aidan Carl Matthews, Antigone Aversion, and Wright's fabulous essay in the London Review Books, Antigone Galway. And she's really concerned with the ways that these new Irish Antigone's are tied to the politics surrounding the Irish recognition of fetal personhood and the constitutional recognition of the fetus as a person, which utilizes a lot of, as Kennedy demonstrates from her own work on the repeal the 8th amendment, which isn't mentioned here, but is. She is responsible for a lot of that activism, utilizes the necrophilic imagery to blame and erase the body of the pregnant women. So how in some ways the fetal person or the representations of the fetus, particularly dead fetuses, come to override the actual, like, woman's body, the maternal body as well, even in cases of death, as we know from Halepavar death. Savita Helpava. I was struggling to remember the first name, which is. Yeah, so, yeah, so really fascinating chapter in terms of Antigone and the ways that that play, despite being part of Asian Greece, has a really strong bearings on the politics of Ireland. And then we move on to Mary Burke's chapter, which is on Killeen's, and the intersection of this symbolic register of undead bodies. So Burke looks at the 1986 novel the Killeen by Mary Leland, which I think is probably not as widely known in Irish studies circles as other novels. But that novel, in its depiction of the Killeen, Burke argues, is used to unearth the unacknowledged suffering through the fictional narrative of these unofficial graveyards. So one of the really striking things about Burke's chapter is the way that I think anyone reading this will have a sense of the landscape of Ireland a little bit differently in terms of thinking about these often unmarked or marked, in small ways, burial sites that are, I guess, punctuate the Irish countryside really in terms of the unburied, the unbaptized, or in some case baptized remains of infants and children. And the ways that Burke is arguing or demonstrating in a really powerful way, a critique of the. The way Leland is critiquing the post independent state for the violence of shame and repression, and the ways that punitive judgment is unequally distributed. So again, taking up the question of sort of social justice and the ways that 20th century Ireland is grounded in this kind of violence, or like invisibilized violence, I guess, through the embodiment of the embodied in the Colleen. And then lastly, we have Mindy McMahon's chapter, which I think really interestingly takes up the question of the absent corpse, which is something that is so central to politics in Northern Ireland, but isn't necessarily the first thing you think about when you think about a book about corpses, because generally the corpse is seen as such a material object. So McMahon examines the absence of dead bodies through the novel, David Park's novel the Truth Commissioner, and the ways that that novel threatens the possibility of reconciliation through unstable memories and the divergence of multiple truths. Through her analysis of that novel, she shows that the ways that the attempt to forget the dead body of the young boy in the Truth Commissioner threatens the possibility of reconciliation and the instability of memories and the divergence of multiple truths. So I think one thing that really is striking about McMahon's analysis is the nuances that she allows to exist within the novel in terms of not really settling on an answer and not really portraying one side as being more morally correct than the other and kind of leaving that ambiguity, but also raising the question of, like, is reconciliation possible when you have these really contentious and unacknowledged disappearances of bodies? So I think in a lot of ways that's a really fitting way to end the corpse book. Of course, then we also have the afterwards. So I think that's a good way to end the chapters because it does raise the question of, I think especially since we currently live, not to extrapolate too much, we currently live in a society in which, I think Philip Aries said this in the 80s, but death is being invisibilized, right? So we have this notion of it's something everyone has to contend with, everyone has to be aware of. But the one thing that struck me when we were working on this whole collection is the ways that modern society is constantly looking for, ways of making death less visible, or we're afraid of confronting the material reality of the corpse and the ways that it kind of becomes something that is just pushed to the end of life, something we don't want to face. And even then, we're not very good at dealing with the end of life. So the corpse kind of becomes, I think, in our world where we have so much contending with deepfakes of AI and this sort of unreality in this wellness culture that's trying to tell us how to live longer and better. But we have the corpse as a reminder of our own humanity. It really is the one aspect of life that we. I mean, there are other aspects of bodies I guess, we also can't ignore, but it's one of those things that it's deeply unpleasant, but we can't also escape. So I think that's one thing that made working this book so interesting and enjoyable, especially to read everyone else's contributions and then to go to the afterwards, which I know is. We talked about how this is not generally done in edited collections. You don't always see an afterwards. But we really wanted something to draw together some of the threads that we saw because the corpse is such a vast topic. So we had Joe Cleary's Afterward, which draw together a lot of these threads through his nuanced reading of, I guess, one of really the most intimate and moving scenes in Irish literature, which is the scene in that they may face the rising sun of the laying out of Johnny's body. And Cleary uses that and also weaves together an analysis of Avalgance's film Jacuz to raise important questions surrounding the care for the dead and what the implications of that care are for the living. I think in doing that, raises really interesting questions surrounding things like end of life care that we. And just, I guess, end of life care, not only meaning hospice care, but also in terms of, just from a wider perspective, aging populations and how society is going to contend with that. Because I think that's becoming a really increasingly pertinent question and one that our society is going to continue to struggle with in coming years.
- [48:13]
Helen Pennett
Absolutely. Thank you so much for that, for that sort of very comprehensive discussion of all of those chapters and of the. Of the Afterword. Is there anything that you think we haven't mentioned in our discussion of the book? I mean, I think we've covered most things. I suppose I was also wondering, because I know it started with a TWEET Is there anything that you might have seen that you might have liked to see addressed and just didn't come forward? I mean, it is really wide ranging in terms of genre and chronology as well. So I can't really think of anything. But I don't know, as editors, was there anything frustrating?
- [48:54]
Matthew Reznicek
I don't think there's. I don't think there's anything we. We were looking for and didn't get. But I do think a larger conversation would be interesting in terms of moving beyond simply Irish literature into history and music, film, you know.
- [49:16]
Helen Pennett
Yeah.
- [49:18]
Matthew Reznicek
I'm always really interested in the ways that Irish Studies maybe over prioritizes both literature and history to the neglect of anthropology, sociology, legal studies. And so thinking about the corpse as a site for a much more interdisciplinary conversation, I think would also be a good conversation to have.
- [49:40]
Helen Pennett
You just need to tweet about it and see what happens and come back in a couple of years when the book is done. I mean, I think it's a great volume and it does cover a really wide range within literature. It's true. So the book is out. I'm sure it took a lot of your time working on it, but I know you're both also busy. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with us that you're working on that we can look forward to reading or hearing in the. In the near future? I'm starting with you, Bridget.
- [50:14]
Bridget English
Yeah, well, I don't know about the near future, but I'm looking at this kind of massively long project looking at the. I guess it started as the relationship between medical institutions and the modernist novel, but has become increasingly focused on mental institutions in Ireland in particular, that I think have been considering that Ireland had throughout the 20th century the highest rate of institutionalization of any country in the world. It's a somewhat not entirely neglected topic, but certainly an undercovered topic. And I think one of the reasons why that is is partially because it's not always directly registered in literary narratives or in culture more generally. We have like Hannah Greeley's autobiography, Bird's Nest Soup, and then we have like Sebastian Berry's Secret Scripture that are like more focused directly on mental institutions, but we don't have as many direct references in a lot of modernist fiction. We have obviously Joyce's daughter Lucia. Joyce institutionalized for schizophrenia for most of her life or certainly from her 20s onwards. So we have it that's this kind of backdrop to a lot of Irish literature and a lot of Irish culture more generally. I think One of the reasons that it's not mentioned more is because of the shame surrounding it. And so from talking to people even you get this sense that there's all these kind of euphemisms for being in a mental institution. So I think it's really interesting to kind of collect those and think about some of the ways that texts of like various different kinds, but obviously being a literary scholar and more focused on novels might be referencing or alluding to those narratives and sort of what kind of we can know or understand because we have. Most of the records from these institutions are written from the perspective of the psychiatrists and other practitioners who are writing records of what the person says. And we don't have a lot of existing patient narratives. So it's interesting to think about the ways that that might come through somewhat in fiction.
- [52:38]
Helen Pennett
That sounds such an interesting project. Difficult to find the material, I imagine, and then to bring it all together. Which explains why it's not for the near future, I suppose.
- [52:47]
Bridget English
Right.
- [52:48]
Helen Pennett
But sometime down the line. That sounds fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing that. Matthew, what's on the cards for you? Yeah, you've just got a book out as well, so.
- [52:59]
Matthew Reznicek
Yeah, and madly starting another one. Thinking about the politics of care and the development of an ethic of care from Frances Burney essentially to Jane Austen. And so thinking about. I have a piece that's making its way on failures of care in the Gothic. And so that's kind of where my head's at at the moment. And then also working with some fabulous colleagues on a co edited collection about Jane Austen and the politics of disability.
- [53:33]
Bridget English
That.
- [53:33]
Helen Pennett
That sounds like another really, really interesting project. So you never stop, neither of you. You need to take care of yourselves and, and not be so, so constantly, constantly productive. Except that otherwise we wouldn't have these wonderful monographs and edited collections to talk about. Well, thank you so much both of you for your time and for sharing all of that about the book. If anyone is interested, as I'm sure they will be. We've been talking about the Corpse in Modern Irish Literature with Liverpool University Press, just out in the last couple of months. Thank you both so much for your time.