We are very pleased to present this special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English devoted to the Irish short story in the twenty-first century. Bertrand Cardin, Professor of English at the Université de Caen Basse-Normandie and guest editor of the issue, has gathered a selection of groundbreaking articles, as well as an insightful introduction and thorough bibliography. As Bertrand Cardin indicates in his introduction, the Irish short story was of great interest to our founding editor, Ben Forkner. We are grateful to Professor Cardin for pursuing this interest and furthering research in the Irish short story. We thank him for his innovative approach to this project and his thoughtful editorial work.

Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher / Foreword
Bertrand Cardin / Introduction

Part 1: Traces of Oral Tradition: Voices, Dialogues and Conversations

Marie Mianowski / Skipping and Gasping, Sighing and Hoping in Colum McCann’s “Aisling”: The Making of a Poet

Catherine Conan / Narration as Conversation: Patterns of Community-making in Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family

Eoghan Smith / “Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields

Chantal Dessaint-Payard / “The Moon Shines Clear, the Horseman’s Here” by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, or the Art of Reconciling Orality and Literacy

Vanina Jobert-Martini / “Black Flower”: Dichotomy, Absurdity and Beyond

Claudia Luppino / The Old and the New in Claire Keegan’s Short Fiction

Part 2: Resonance, Revision and Reinvention

Elke D’hoker / Rereading the Mother in Edna O’Brien’s Saints and Sinners

The Irish (Short) Story, Level 1: Julian Gough’s “The Orphan and the Mob”

Jeanette Roberts Shumaker /

Questioning the Paddy Stereotype in Edna O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings”

Part 3: The Ironic Observation of Contemporary Ireland

Bertrand Cardin / Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan, or the Chronicle of a Collapse Foretold

Thierry Robin /

Anne Enright’s Short Fiction: “Post-Freudian and Post-Feminist and, of course (three cheers!), Post-Nationalist”?

Eugene O'Brien /

The Subjective Real in William Trevor’s “Justina’s Priest”

Part 4: Metanarrative Reflections

Debbie Brouckmans and Elke D'hoker / Rewriting the Irish Short Story: Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

John McCourt / “All Stories Overlap”: Reading Keith Ridgway’s Short Fiction

Claire Majola-Leblond / Writing Aslant: Putting Chisel to Paper-William Trevor’s A Bit on the Side

Bibliography

Bernard Cardin / Selective Bibliography