Streams of Damaged Consciousness

Streams of Damaged Consciousness examines the striking resurgence of stream-of-consciousness writing in Ireland during the decade following the 2008–09 financial crash. In the wake of national catastrophe, a generation of emergent Irish writers turned back to this modernist form of narrative, reanimating its experimental energy and its attention to psychological interiority—particularly the legacy of James Joyce. Yet these authors did far more than revive an inherited form. In works such as Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Anakana Schofield’s Martin John, Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, they refocused the mode around damaged, traumatized, and bewildered characters, internalizing that damage into the very form and syntax of the novels.

Aran Ward Sell traces this movement’s rise with particular attention to the publication infrastructure that sustained it: the small Dublin literary magazines, independent presses, and book prizes that brought daring new voices to national and international acclaim. Reading these writers as practitioners of a “stream of damaged consciousness,” Ward Sell argues that they represent a vital twenty-first-century extension of modernist aesthetics, and he shows how radical literary forms emerge from periods of social and economic upheaval.