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Niall Ó Cuileagáin is a Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow working on a project entitled Rural Radicals: Modernity and Modernism in Rural Ireland, 1900-1950. This project focuses on four politically radical writers—W.P. Ryan, Peadar O’Donnell, Teresa Deevy, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain—most of whom came from rural Ireland and made rural matters a central concern in their interrogations of modernity and visions of the nation. Niall’s forthcoming monograph, James Joyce, Rural Ireland and Modernity: Beyond the Pale(Edinburgh University Press, 2025), is based on the Wolfson-funded PhD he completed at University College London in 2022. It offers a reappraisal of the dominant Dublin-centric readings of Joyce by delving into his depictions of rural and provincial Ireland. Niall’s research has also been published in James Joyce in Italy, the Dublin James Joyce Journal and the Review of Irish Studies in Europe.
Research Projects
Title
Role
Description
Start date
End date
Amount
Rural Radicals: Modernity and Modernism in Rural Ireland, 1900-1950
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
In 1973, Raymond Williams criticized intellectuals for displaying what he called a ‘long contempt’ for rural life, arguing that, for many critics, life ‘seemed to begin and end in the city, and if there was anything beyond it, it was also beyond life’. Nevertheless, literary criticism has continued to place emphasis on the urban when dealing with modernity and modernism, all the while associating rural life with conservatism. Spanning works from 1900-1950, ‘Rural Radicals’ will offer a correction to such long-lasting trends by focusing on radical Irish writers, most of whom hailed from rural Ireland and made rural matters the main subject of their literary works, while also being politically engaged throughout their lives. During this period of cultural revival and political revolution, rural Ireland became symbolic of an idealized, and often conservative, version of Ireland. The four primary authors under investigation—WP Ryan, Peadar O’Donnell, Teresa Deevy, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain—respond in various ways to such idealizations while also delving into traditions of rural radicalism. Each author remains relatively understudied and outside the canon of Irish literature, thus offering the potential for fresh perspectives on a famously seismic period in Irish history. The works studied will explore a wide cross-section of literary expressions of the rural, from journalism to novels and works of theatre, while material in the Irish language will be studied side-by-side with works in English, leading to a more holistic approach to literary evocations of rural Ireland. The project will engage with emerging theories relating to rural modernity/modernism, while also responding to Marxist readings of Irish literature. By doing so, this project will not just open up a new way of viewing rural Irish literature but will also pave the way for new approaches to rurality more broadly, with implications far beyond an Irish context.
02/09/2024
31/08/2026
Book
Year
Publication
2025
Niall Ó Cuileagáin (2025) James Joyce, Rural Ireland and Modernity: Beyond the Pale. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Peer Reviewed Journal
Year
Publication
2024
Niall Ó Cuileagáin (2024) 'A Joycean Smutmonger: Echoes of Joyce in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Rural Modernism'. Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 7 (1):58-76. [Link][DOI][Full-Text]
2023
Niall Ó Cuileagáin (2023) '“Rus in Urbe”: The Semi-Rural Liminal Zones of Ulysses'. Dublin James Joyce Journal, 14-15 :18-35.
2019
Niall Ó Cuileagáin (2019) '“Is he as innocent as his speech?”: Rural Hiberno-English in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. Joyce Studies in Italy, 21 :113-126. [Link]
Other Journal
Year
Publication
2020
Niall Ó Cuileagáin; Sam Caleb (2020) '“Forget, Remember!’: Literature and Nostalgia'Moveable Type, 12 :3-16. [Link][DOI]
Book Review
Year
Publication
2024
Niall Ó Cuileagáin (2024) Máirtín Ó Cadhain 2020. [Book Review] [Link] https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2024.0694
