Communities of difference in contemporary Irish literature: Paul Muldoon, Frank McGuinness, and Patrick McCabe

A wide range of scholarship has traditionally read Irish literature's engagement with community in terms of the nation. Because Paul Muldoon, Frank McGuinness, and Patrick McCabe write communities of difference rather than communities in spite of difference, however, their work requires a more flexible critical approach that can address forms of community other than those determined by the nation. Taking such an approach, this dissertation argues that their literary representations of community---Muldoon's community on the cusp, McGuinness's borders and crossings, McCabe's narratives of belonging---are centrally concerned with community's tensions and paradoxes. By making this argument, this dissertation also contributes to a broader critical framework for Irish literature, one within which these same questions can be asked across the range of that literature. This framework is valuable not because it leads to a more valid vision of a community in Irish literature, but because it addresses the divergent responses to community that have been overshadowed by the attention paid to national forms.