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4. Postmodern Blaguardry: Frank McCourt, the Celtic Tiger, and the Ashes of History
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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This chapter examines how Frank McCourt's Pulitzer-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, ironically recapitulates and inverts the narrative modes and aesthetic emphases of Irish late modernism in the context of Ireland's short-lived "Celtic Tiger" boom at the end of the twentieth century. Though generally dismissed by scholars, Angela's Ashes is shown to yield surprising insights about the Celtic Tiger mentality and the trajectory of Irish postcoloniality under the influence of globalization. The chapter argues that McCourt develops a postmodern naturalism that cynically de-materializes Irish postcolonial history and reveals how postcolonial narrative forms are increasingly overtaken by their representations of markets of all sorts. In this way, the chapter proposes, we can more clearly discern distinct phases of postcolonial culture and consider how different modernist and postmodernist modes signal postcoloniality's gradual synchronization with the logic and modalities of global capitalism.