This Open access book is a collection of essays and offers an in-depth analysis of silence as
an aesthetic practice and a textual strategy which paradoxically speaks of the unspoken nature
of many inconvenient hidden truths of Irish society in the work of contemporary fiction
writers. The study acknowledges Ireland's history of damaging silences and considers its
legacies but it also underscores how silence can serve as a valuable even productive means
of expression. From a wide range of critical perspectives the individual essays address among
other issues the conspiracies of silence in Catholic Ireland the silenced structural
oppression of Celtic Tiger Ireland the recovery of silenced stories voices of the past and
their examination in the present as well as millennial disaffection and the silencing of
vulnerability in today's neoliberal Ireland. The book 's attention to silence provides a rich
vocabulary for understandingwhat unfolds in the quiet interstices of Irish writing from recent
decades. This study also invokes the past to understand the present and thus demonstrates the
continuities and discontinuities that define how silence operates in Irish culture. Grant
FFI2017-84619-P AEI ERDF EU (INTRUTHS Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in
Contemporary Irish Fiction) Funded by the Spanish Research Agency AEI http: dx.doi.org
10.13039 501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund ERDF A Way of Making Europe
