Rachael Sealy Lynch, Tuberculosis and Irish Fiction, 1800–2022: A Lingering Condition

Such astringency is salutary.But what are we to make of a chapter by an academic based in France, writing about Irish fiction, that does not consider the reception of these works in the cultures they represent?For instance, have any Nigerian critics responded to O'Brien's novel?Might not it have been better for this book to have commissioned a chapter from there?At such points, transnationalism as literary critical practice often breaks down.(For instance, Ramazani's book only dealt with anglophone poetry.)It is a discourse for the US-European academy that itself often displays a sterile interculturality, of which we are all occasionally guilty.My pointed questions about McCann's chapter perhaps apply to transnational literary criticism more generally.Finally, Michael Malouf's chapter about the fiction of Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan thinks about varieties of English and language acquisition in the global economy.His revelatory readings of these two gifted novelists are a model of transnational criticism that follows the routes of Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Dolan's Exciting Times, without losing sight of their roots.He proposes 'a way of considering language use in contemporary Irish fiction in terms other than lamenting its departure from a 'distinctive' regional accent' (p.275).The protagonists in both novels acquire a new, more international variety of English, and are aware of the economic implications of the shift.Dolan's protagonist reports on her life in Hong Kong in a witty, placeless international idiom, but switches to a densely referenced mode of communication when talking on the phone with her mother and brother back in Dublin.The collision of varieties is one of mainsprings of the novel.Despite Parsons's caveats, the nation still persists here as an exceptional space.After all, this is about Irish transnationalism, published in a series entitled Themes in Irish Literature and Culture.However much or little 'liquefaction' Ireland can take before it disappears, the process of dissolving, as evidenced by the best chapters here, is a good subject for critique.