Building upon two interconnected twenty-first century developments in Irish studies and modernist studies, this essay revisits the critical debate concerning Patrick Kavanagh’s engagement with aesthetic modernism in The Great Hunger. Rather than primarily focusing on the aesthetic correspondences between Kavanagh’s poem and the literature produced by his European modernist contemporaries, however, this essay brings The Great Hunger into dialogue with the formal techniques and thematic preoccupations evident in the work of African American modernist writers, such as Sterling A. Brown and Lanston Hughes, and examines how The Great Hunger draws dynamism from the jazz aesthetic and from the modes of cultural resistance that are embodied in this aesthetic form. In addition to highlighting how modernist literature can emerge from the ostensibly rural margins of the metropolitan centre, so to speak, this essay explores how African American art and thought provides a critical framework to explore the dynamics of power and oppression in other cultural contexts. In doing so, it shows how Kavanagh’s agricultural modernism draws on aspects of the jazz aesthetic to dramatise the physical, emotional, and psychological burden borne by the citizens of mid-twentieth century Ireland at a time when using this aesthetic form was in and of itself a subversive act.
Matthew Fogarty (Sat,) studied this question.