The Celtic Phoenix, capitalist realism, and contemporary Irish women’s novels

In this article, I analyse the literary realism of four women novelists in the context of the Celtic Phoenix. While realism has always been closely associated with capitalism as a genre and form, a neo-modernist turn emerged in Irish fiction writing in the years following 2012. This has been analysed in terms of a formal reaction to or against the capitalist realism of austerity policies. The realist novel, however, has remained popular with contemporary women writers, and, in this article I examine novels by Naoise Dolan, Niamh Campbell, Sara Baume, and Sally Rooney, asking how their work subverts or critiques capitalism not just in content, but in form. In particular, artmaking emerges as a self-reflexive motif through which these writers gain critical distance from the totalising capitalist systems they inhabit, and consider the ethics of creative production within this system.