Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in peril.

In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and 21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage has served to enable such abuse.

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the children and those who failed them.

About the Author

Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo. He is author and editor of several books, most recently The Myth of Manliness in Irish Nationalist Culture, 1880-1922. He is also editor of the annotated edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker and (with Marjorie Howes) of Yeats and Afterwords: Christ, Culture, and Crisis. Margot Gayle Backus holds a John and Rebecca Moores Professorship in the Department of English at the University of Houston. She is author of The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality and Child Sacrifice in the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order and of Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars.

Reviews

Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus's The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable digs fearlessly into a centurylong literary canon of abused Irish children, unmasking and unmaking the psychological operations that have allowed such abuse, as Fintan O'Toole writes in the book's preface, to long be Ireland's shameful "unknown known" (xiii).

-- Renee Fox * Irish Literary Supplement *

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature is a beautifully written and intellectually stimulating book that casts much needed light on the representation of the child sexual scandal in modern Irish literature. For anyone with the slightest interest in the intersection between literature, psychology, cultural theory and sociology and the light they can cast on Irish society, this book is a must read, provided that one understands that it is a highly academic study not intended for a general audience. It shows how in many respects the trauma associated with child abuse in Ireland is still at an early stage, and that healing will only come slowly.

-- Eamon Maher * Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Review *

Through intricate and rigorous close readings of literature, ranging from James Joyce to Anne Enright, and nuanced applications of psychoanalytic theory, Valente and Backus outline the way that Irish literature engages modern social and cultural discourse, as well as silence and abstraction, to identify sexual trauma in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. Just as they consistently suggest that intracommunity recognition of child sex scandal in Ireland is essential to recovering the social repression of trauma, they also offer academics a reminder of how we might save the Humanities from dissolution and despair: write, think, and witness together. . . . Put simply: we need more books like this in Irish Studies.

-- Ellen Scheible * New Hibernia Review *

The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature should be required reading for students of Irish literature and history. . . . I would also recommend that The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, be recommended reading for psychiatrists, therapists and counselors working with victims of child sex abuse and institutional abuse. As is often the case, writers can illuminate the path forward in understanding.

-- Adrienne Leavy * Reading Ireland *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253053183
Author Joseph Valente
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press