"Welcome to the Good Life!" Neoliberalism(s) and Contemporary Irish Women's Short Fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which neoliberalism as a pervasive economic, political, and cultural discourse is represented, recreated, and subverted in contemporary short fiction by Claire Keegan, Nicole Flattery, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Wendy Erskine, Danielle McLaughlin, Cathy Sweeney, Louise Kennedy, Claire-Louise Bennett, June Caldwell, and Niamh Mulvey. My concerns in this thesis are: firstly, the implications of the neoliberal phase of late capitalist development for everyday life; secondly, how everyday life might be involved in (re)producing neoliberal norms; thirdly, the role of literature in subverting or reproducing neoliberalism as a ?common sense? structuring principle for individuals and the collective in contemporary Ireland. Over five chapters ? on the body, the home, the land, the city, and history ? I address these issues with regard to neoliberalism as a global and globalising stage of capitalist development, and to its Irish geographic and historical specificities. By taking a broad swathe of writers, and collections published in the last fifteen years, I establish that neoliberalism is both a key concern in contemporary Irish fiction and a central pillar in establishing what the contemporary is. Neoliberalism is the backdrop of everyday life in these texts, not because it is a neutral reality, but because it is recreated and reaffirmed by everyday suspension of disbelief and everyday routine. Here, I follow Lauren Berlant and others in theorising the contemporary in terms of aesthetics and affect (rather than, say, chronology or events), where neoliberalism?s administrative influence both creates and forecloses on the possibility of future lives and narratives. By examining short fiction, I focalise marginality, snapshots, and snippets, and thus highlight fragments which at once (re)produce the neoliberal everyday and which might puncture its narrative totality.