"The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century interprets a wide variety of the most engaging Irish novels of the last ten years of the twentieth century from a perspective that focuses on the regulated sexual and constructed body. The demarcating line of identity - that perennial Irish problem - is gauged at the basic level of sexual and gender identity in contrast to or alliance with political, social, religious, or cultural norms.

Novels published in the last decade of the twentieth century by such writers as John Banville, Mary Costello, Seamus Deane, Emma Donoghue, Roddy Doyle, Deirdre Madden, Patrick McCabe, and Mary Morrissy have crossed, erased, overwritten, and rewritten the space where identity is regulated or deregulated. Utilizing a Deleuzian reading strategy, the contemporary Irish novel produces a different kind of "sense" by presenting bodies whose zone of determinability is outside the regulatory norm granting, or intentionally not granting, the body an agency hitherto prohibited.

All mechanisms that have gone into controlling the body-gender regulation, violence, representations of desire, religious taboos - are reinterpreted through the body in motion."--BOOK JACKET.