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Christopher Cusack et al. eds., "The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature" (Liverpool UP, 2026)

May 5, 2026

Matthew Resnicek, Associate Professor of Medical Humanities who studies literature, health, and disability; and Bridget English, Senior Lecturer in English specializing in modernism and Irish studies. They trace the corpse across Irish writing from Famine and Gothic texts to modernist and contemporary works. Conversations cover the book’s surprising origin, its chronological and genre-spanning structure, and themes of haunting, burial, and bodily politics.

54:53

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INSIGHT

Staging Corpses Tests Cultural Limits

Revivalist drama and folklore stage corpses to test cultural boundaries between tragic seriousness and comic deflation.
Michael McAteer reads Douglas Hyde and Synge to show audiences critiqued Singe's plays for being either too realistic or too comic about corpses.

insights

INSIGHT

Irish Language Poems Treat The Language As Corpse

Irish-language poetry often treats the language itself as a corpse to be spoken for or awakened.
Daniela Tienova traces poets who frame Irish as 'always already dead', using corpse imagery to critique language endangerment and cultural loss.

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INSIGHT

Maternal Corpse As Catalytic Septic Figure

The maternal corpse recurs as a catalytic figure that both poisons and enables narrative renewal in modernist Irish fiction.
Bridget links 'septic' imagery across Joyce, O'Brien, Bowen, and Higgins to puerperal sepsis, waste, and regenerative decay motifs.

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Editors' Introductions and Backgrounds

02:32 • 1min

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How the Project Began

03:55 • 1min

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Structuring a Wide-Ranging Collection

05:00 • 3min

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Reframing the Corpse: 18th–19th Century Genres

08:25 • 5min

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Revitalizing the Corpse: Revival and Modernism

13:26 • 12min

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Familial Corpses: Maternal and Paternal Deaths

25:20 • 11min

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Unquiet Remains: Haunting and Social Justice

Set in the aftermath of Ireland's economic collapse, The Spinning Heart tells the story of a small town reeling from unemployment, ghost estates, and a rogue property developer who has fled. Through 21 distinct monologues from residents—men, women, and children—Donal Ryan explores themes of mental health, family tensions, masculinity, deception, and resilience, weaving individual struggles into a poignant portrait of contemporary rural Ireland.

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• Mentioned in 129 episodes

Ulysses

James Joyce

Ulysses is a groundbreaking and complex modernist novel that chronicles the experiences of three Dubliners over a single day. The novel is loosely based on Homer's epic poem 'The Odyssey', with Leopold Bloom paralleling Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus paralleling Telemachus, and Molly Bloom paralleling Penelope. It explores themes such as antisemitism, human sexuality, British rule in Ireland, Catholicism, and Irish nationalism. The novel is known for its innovative use of language and narrative techniques, including stream-of-consciousness and multiple literary styles. It captures the essence of early 20th-century Dublin, providing a detailed snapshot of the city's social, political, and cultural landscape.

#2590

• Mentioned in 19 episodes

Dubliners

James Joyce

Dubliners is a collection of short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. The stories are arranged to track the lives of Dubliners from childhood to old age, exploring themes such as the 'paralysis' of Irish society, the desire for escape, and the intersection of life and death. Each story features a different plot and characters but is connected by the theme of epiphany, where characters experience life-changing moments of revelation. The collection is known for its realistic portrayal of Dublin life, highlighting issues such as alcoholism, religious tension, and political concerns of the time.

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The Sister

Sung-Yoon Lee

The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature

Christopher Cusack; Bridget English; Matthew L. Resnicek (editors)

The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature is an edited volume (Cusack, English, Resnicek) that traces how corpses function across Irish literary culture from the late eighteenth century to contemporary works. The collection gathers chapters on graveyard poetry, the Gothic, revivalist drama, Irish-language poetry, modernist and contemporary novels, and theatre to show patterns of continuity and change. Contributors analyze how corpses signal ethical, political, and medico-legal concerns, including state power, family structures, national identity, and unresolved violences. The volume intervenes in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies, and medical and health humanities by positioning the corpse as a conceptually rich focal point. It was published by Liverpool University Press in 2026.

The House in Paris (1935) by Elizabeth Bowen interweaves past and present through the lives of residents connected to an upstairs dying matriarch, revealing how memory, regret, and history shape personal identities. Bowen's evocative prose and focus on atmosphere examines the psychological effects of familial loss and social constraints. Critics read the novel for its exploration of time, mourning, and the disruptive influence of death on the living. The podcast mentions it when discussing how maternal death provokes reassessment of the past and future in fiction.

The Truth Commissioner

David Park

David Park's The Truth Commissioner (2008) is a novel centered on a government-appointed truth commissioner investigating wartime disappearances and abuses in Northern Ireland. The narrative probes themes of memory, competing narratives, moral ambiguity, and the difficulty of reconciliation absent physical remains. Park's work interrogates the limits of institutional processes to deliver justice or closure. The podcast references it in relation to how absent corpses complicate reconciliation and collective memory.

Wild Irish Girl

Catherine Maria Sedgwick

The Wild Irish Girl, published in 1806 by Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson) — often attributed in scholarship to her pen name — is a novel exploring Irish identity through the interactions between an English protagonist and an idealized Irish heroine. The work mixes travel narrative, romance, and political commentary to depict Ireland's culture, history, and social tensions under colonial rule. It was widely read in Britain and beyond and contributed to debates about national representation, sympathy, and reform. Scholars use the novel to explore early national-tale forms and the transnational circulation of cultural stereotypes and sympathies. (Note: in the podcast, the novel is discussed in relation to modes of death and medical authority in Matthew Resnicek's chapter. )

Balcony of Europe

Aidan Higgins

The Balcony of Europe (1969) by Aidan Higgins follows an Irish expatriate's experiences in Spain and the returns of memory and loss that shape his psyche. The novel is noted for its lyrical, associative style and for scenes that meditate on mortality and social dislocation. It features a striking depiction of a mother's dying that has drawn critical attention for its emotional intensity and thematic resonance. The podcast references it in discussing maternal corpses and modernist treatments of death.

Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992) follows Francie Brady, a young boy in a small Irish town, as he descends into paranoia and violence amid family breakdown and societal pressures. The novel combines black humour with brutal depictions of abuse and mental illness, interrogating postcolonial Irish identity and social institutions. It has been praised for its linguistic energy and troubling portrayal of childhood trauma. The podcast references the novel in discussing parental corpses as narrative devices.

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The devil we know

Robert Baer

In 'The Devil We Know,' Robert Baer draws on his intelligence experience to analyze Iran's rise as a regional power and the motivations behind its foreign policy. He explores Tehran's relationships with proxy groups, its strategic aims across the Middle East, and the ways U.S. policy has interacted with Iranian ambitions. Baer combines on-the-ground anecdotes, historical context, and policy critique to argue for a realistic understanding of Iran's capabilities and intentions. The book offers insights into intelligence operations and the complexities of confronting a state that blends ideological goals with pragmatic strategy. It serves as both a memoir of engagement and a policy-oriented assessment of how to deal with Tehran.

From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge's sodden corpses and Joyce's dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts.

Taking Irish literature's obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature (Liverpool UP, 2026) demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities.

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