Eve Patten will give a lecture on Yeats, Joyce, and Irish Literature. Ireland's modern literary tradition is 'saturated in parody' (Mericer, 1962). Yeats is one of the most parodied writers in literary history; Joyce's Ulysses would not exist without his deployment of multiple levels of parody, and the Irish Literary Revival was lampooned and caricatured through parody both in Ireland and abroad. How do we understand parodic practice, from the local context of an Irish counter-revival to an international modernist meta-discourse (Diepevven, 2019), and even beyond, to current concerns with the 'fake' and artificially generated? Noting a range of writers from Michael 'Jackdaw' McManus to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Enda O'Brien, she'll be discussing the politics of parody and asking where it should sit within Ireland's literary and critical heritage. 

Eve Patten is the Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. A scholar in nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish and British literature and cultural history, she is the editor of the volume of essays, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and author of a book about representations of Ireland’s revolutionary decade in English writing, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently collaborating with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast on the Ireland’s Border Culture project (funded by the HEA Shared Island program) which will produce a digital archive of border-related literature and visual art. She has recently co-edited Dublin Tales, a volume of short stories by Irish writers on the subject of Ireland’s capital, published by Oxford in 2023.