David McKinney, Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study, New York: Routledge, 2025, 201 p.

Abstract

David McKinney’s study of contemporary Irish fiction represents a timely contribution to two topical and interconnected strands of scholarship: the growing body of research concerned with the aftermath of Ireland’s post-2008 financial collapse and the broader critical debates surrounding the global crises ascribed to late capitalism. More precisely, McKinney examines the post-crash turn towards literary experimentation, arguing that Irish writers “consciously or unconsciously” draw on Beckettian tropes to tackle the unspeakable in their works, as well as to register and convey the emotional depths of structural disempowerment (1). In developing his claim, he builds on Mary M. McGlynn’s argument that recent Irish fiction exhibits traits of “irrealism,” a term borrowed from the Warwick Research Collective to describe the formal strategies of the semi-periphery within the world-literary system (2-3). Yet, McKinney extends McGlynn’s argument by tracing the roots of this aesthetic tendency among Irish writers back to the conceptual, non-representational techniques of Samuel Beckett.