The Modern Irish Bildungsroman: Confrontations and Transformations

With this study Shahriyar Mansouri examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern Irish Bildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ present in the nation’s unfortunate engagement with the postcolonial Irish State’s politics of formation. The result, Mansouri argues, is a resistant and radical form which introduces non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonists, whose antithetical perception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts of the post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, Mansouri focuses on 13 novels from 11 notable Irish novelists, such as Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Francis Stuart and William Trevor. The selected novels provide an invaluable insight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism and modern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produces a critical dialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistorical modern protagonist.