Preface: Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry – Frank McGuinness
Introduction – Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Part I: Memory, trauma, and the Troubles
1 ‘Images … at the absolute edge of memory’: memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Time Present and Time Past – Stefanie Lehner
2 ‘The horror of little details’: remembering the Troubles in Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness – Elisabeth Chase
3 Journeying through loss: transcendence and healing in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms – Catriona Clutterbuck
4 Class and multiplicity in One by One in the Darkness – Brian Cliff

Part II: Art and objects
5 Objects in Deirdre Madden’s artist novels – Sylvie Mikowski
6 Ageing and identity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity – Heather Ingman
7 Sensing one’s way forward: psychological aspects of creativity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity – Hedwig Schwall
8 ‘What can we do, what does art do?’: ethics and aesthetics in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness and Molly Fox’s Birthday – Teresa Casal
9 Looking at animals and objects in Deirdre Madden’s children’s books and some adult fiction – Julie Anne Stevens

Part III: Home and place
10 Nothing is Black: the early Celtic Tiger and Europe – Jerry White
11 Imaginaries of home in Deirdre Madden’s fiction – Elke D’hoker
12 The architectural uncanny: family secrets and the Gothic in The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone – Anne Fogarty
13 Living lives: Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, Time Present and Time Past and the Irish Celtic Tiger novel – Derek Hand
14 In conversation with Deirdre Madden – Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Index

Deirdre Madden: New critical perspectives is a landmark study of this important and highly regarded Irish novelist. It underscores the range, imaginative complexity, and enduring relevance of Madden’s fictions. The essays collected in this volume explore her crucial Troubles and post-Troubles fictions, Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past and draw out their interconnected portrayals of violence, grief, time, trauma, and memory.

Madden’s dexterous use of the novel form is highlighted, especially her bending of the conventions of realism to encompass searching philosophical and existential themes. Revealingly, she is shown to be a foremost practitioner of the artist novel or Künstlerroman. Through the figures of the writer, the painter, the photographer, and the actor, she examines the ability of art to remake and distil reality and to shed indirect light on emotional cruxes that cannot otherwise be fathomed. These essays provide an overview of all of Madden’s work, including her children’s novels, and uncover its inquiring and multidimensional qualities. Her overarching themes are drawn out, amongst them the familial, states of dislocation, resonant objects, the haunting aftermath of the past, the transnational, and the regenerative function of art.

Making use of a wide variety of approaches, these essays persuasively elucidate the compelling subtleties of Madden’s fiction. Readers are invited to discover the work of this accomplished Irish writer who across all her novels engages thought-provokingly with contemporary life, politics, and art.