“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”, WB Yeats famously declared in September 1913, “It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” Rhetorically consigning an entire cultural project to the “grave”, Yeats’s poem seems to make a corpse of the national literary tradition he was so intimately involved in reviving. Yeats was far from the first and far from the last to associate Ireland and Irish literature with the dead body. From the slain warriors in the Táin to the graveyard poetry of the 1790s, from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801) to Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter (2020), not to mention the bodies that haunt the Irish stage, corpses are everywhere in Irish literature.
This proliferation of dead bodies in Irish writing is more than a sign of a morbid fascination with death: it is also an effort to make sense of Irish life. Taking its cue from that observation, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature, out now from Liverpool University Press, poses the question: what do Irish literature’s dead bodies reveal about Irish society and culture?
Across 15 chapters, the editors and 12 invited scholars consider representations of the corpse in Irish literature from the 18th century to the present, showing how the construction of Irish identity is bound up with the care and treatment – or lack thereof – of the dead body. The chapters in this collection have been organised to encourage new points of contact between literary texts and conceptions of corpses. In the subsections readers can find thematic strands that bring together fiction, autofiction, poetry, drama and folklore, fostering a more nuanced view of the ways that corpses have shaped the literary imagination, in both English- and Irish-language writing.
As is evident from these chapters, Irish corpses do not have a singular meaning, nor are they always indicative of the same specific attitudes towards death. Rather, the corpse is used by Irish authors to explore topics as diverse as gender roles and motherhood, ageing, political unrest, memorialisation and financial crisis.
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Colleen English, for instance, argues that Irish graveyard poetry, and its engagement with the dead body, is not simply an imitation of English models, but has the subversive power to translate grief into political action. Michael McAteer’s chapter analyses the work of Douglas Hyde and JM Synge to demonstrate how the corpse in Irish folklore and Revival-era writing can symbolise the state of the nation but also call for its renewal.
The book also reveals how literary forms can shape and challenge existing cultural identities and ideologies. Studying unconventional engagements with the Irish gothic, Christina Morin discusses how the representation of the corpse can become a vehicle to raise questions about how literary value is constructed. Matthew Reznicek’s contribution on Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl uses the corpse to highlight shifting perceptions of the relationship between disease, politics and power. Daniela Theinová shows how Irish-language poets subversively use the figure of the corpse to counter premature pronouncements of the death of the Irish language.
As the collection demonstrates, literature has a unique ability to probe the commerce between the past, present and imagined future. Christopher Cusack examines the representation of dead fathers in fiction about the passing of the Celtic Tiger, showing how such texts draw on the memory of the Famine and other grim episodes from Irish history to criticise the greed motivating Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan looks at how Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat ties the corpse central to the 18th-century Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill to the idea of the maternal in the 21st century.
Indeed, the figure of the corpse can be a powerful instrument for interrogating Irish society and politics. Sinéad Kennedy shows in her chapter that Irish rewritings of Sophocles’s Antigone, which revolves around proper care for the dead body, can be read in relation to Ireland’s dark past of incarcerating socially “undesirable” people in church-run institutions and to the abortion debate.
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Mary Burke reflects on the background, symbolism, and social resonance of cillíní, the unconsecrated burial grounds where stillborn, premature and unbaptised babies used to be buried. José Lanters shows how the corpses in Marina Carr’s dramas can be read as symbols of the decomposition of family and social orders, highlighting the need for justice.
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While these chapters dwell on the presence of dead bodies, Mindi McMann’s essay is distinct in its focus on the absence of a body, exploring how David Park’s The Truth Commissioner uses the search for the missing body of a Troubles victim to raise thorny questions about memory and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
Irish modernism is infamous for its host of dead bodies. Focusing on the discourse of venereal disease, Lloyd Meadhbh Houston’s essay refocuses our understanding of the corpse of Father Flynn in James Joyce’s The Sisters. Joyce also figures prominently in Bridget English’s chapter on how the “septic” maternal dead body in texts by Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Aidan Higgins problematises personifications of the country as “Mother Ireland”, and points to wider failures in infrastructures of care.
O’Brien is also central to Margaret O’Neill’s chapter, which investigates how the sight of dead and dying bodies in O’Brien’s novels prompts reflection and development in the living, causing them to imagine a reality for women free from patriarchal constraints.
In his afterword, Joe Cleary brings together the book’s numerous strands, concluding with a sensitive reading of one of the most intimate scenes in modern Irish literature: the laying out of dead neighbour Johnny’s body in John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun.
Collectively, these essays show that literary depictions of corpses allow readers to confront death in all of its terrifying, profound and even morbidly humorous manifestations. And there remains more to be said.
Though published just after our book manuscript was completed, Liadan Ní Chuinn’s short story Russia, in their 2025 collection Every One Still Here, shows again just how powerful representations of the corpse can be as symbols of social critique. In the story, activists leave wreaths at displays of human remains in the Ulster Museum to raise questions about the variable ethics of our engagement with the dead – demonstrating again just how deeply suffused with meaning Irish literary corpses are.
The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature, edited by Christopher Cusack, Bridget English and Matthew Reznicek, is published by Liverpool University Press. Cusack teaches at Radboud University in the Netherlands. English teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago. Reznicek teaches at the University of Minnesota.
