Professor John Carson provided the cover illustration of for the book Patrick McCabe’s Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto, and Winterwood edited by Jennifer Keating.
Few contemporary Irish writers have been more attuned to the historical influence of partition on Ireland’s culture and literary representation than Patrick McCabe. In the recent context of Brexit, his work produced in the late nineteen nineties and early two-thousands carries considerable poignancy, especially in relation to the Catholic Church, gender roles and persistence of a history of violence in Ireland. This volume attends to three novels, The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood as an emblematic representation of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Contributors are: K. Brisley Brennan, Aisling Cormack, Flore Coulouma, Luke Gibbons, Lindsay Haney, Barbara Hoffmann, Jennifer Keating, James F. Knapp, Colin MacCabe, Kristina Varade.