Abstract
Although George Moore is usually hailed as the ‘father’ of the modern Irish short story, this chapter makes a case for alternative ‘mothers’ of this tradition. It argues that the short fiction of George Egerton, on the one hand, and of Somerville and Ross, on the other, can be considered the starting points of two trends which have dominated the Irish short story throughout the twentieth century. Somerville and Ross’s Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899) offers the prototype of the popular, plot-bound, magazine story which was hugely successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and continues to exert its influence until this day. George Egerton’s experimental and innovative short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) prepare the stage for the impressionist, mood-dependent, and psychological short story which would flourish in modernist literature. Through a detailed analysis of their short fiction, this chapter shows how these writers all foreground social conceptualizations of the self: Somerville and Ross by depicting individuals as part of a community (albeit one ambivalently defined in terms of class, gender and nationality); Egerton by modifying the Nietzschean conceptualization of the free and strong-willed individual into the ideal of the relational self, shaped by both personal freedom and an ethics of care.
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D’hoker, E. (2016). Mothers of the Irish Short Story: George Egerton and Somerville and Ross. In: Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30288-1_2
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