The abundance of contemporary Irish fiction dealing with crime seems hard to refute. While most works have been produced in the literary field, cinema has also explored Ireland’s contemporary situation through the lens of crime fiction. The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between crime, crisis, and capital in a contemporary Irish thriller: Peter Murphy and Rachael Moriarty’s Traders (2015). The film creates a bleak and acidic depiction of Ireland’s financial world and how in times of crisis, crime and capital are negotiated and articulated. A brief introduction of what the Celtic Tiger era and its subsequent crisis meant for Ireland will be followed by an exploration of its relation to the crime thriller. By studying crime and its intersections with class structures, economic conditions, and the shaping of its space in the film, I will attempt to undertake an economic and aesthetic reading. Moreover, I will consider how the film delineates a portrait of Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger society and all its consequences.

The American storyteller Grace Paley (December 11, 1922-August 22, 2007) has been known for her political activism and her ability to construct powerful voices which recollected female, migrant, and urban collective experiences in post-World War II America. In her stories, Paley emphasizes the act of storytelling as a tool for creating a collective shared experience out of individual characters, making the personal and domestic collective and political. In this paper, I will analyze the role of Paley’s most prominent narrator, Faith Darwin, bridging the gap between the private and public urban spheres in three different and evolutive stories: “A Conversation with My Father” (1972), “The Long-Distance Runner” and “Faith in a Tree” (1974). These stories exemplify how Faith uses different strategies in storytelling with the purpose of achieving personal identity and empowerment through communal identification and the recollection of familiar experiences

Arthurian mythology has often been employed to articulate notions of nationhood, identity, and nationalism. In the recent wave of nationalist nostalgia, myths, such as Arthur’s, have been put forth as core narratives to return to, articulating the longing for a primitivist, pastoral, pre-modern England. The post-Brexit landscape has seen a rise of neo-imperialism, more obvious in so-called ‘global Britain’ / ‘Renaissance England’, overlooking how Britain and its polarisation seem to be closer in spirit now to the Civil War than to the times of hegemonic splendour. This article analyses how Wheatley’s 2011 Kill List reappropriates Arthurian mythology by subverting its usual purpose of reaffirming a hegemonic sense of nationhood. The analysis uses three main methods: defining myth in contemporary England and its cultural products, establishing a correlation between Folk Horror and the Arthurian legend, and studying Arthurian myths and motifs present in the film and their significance. It ultimately concludes that the Arthurian myth is used to question the blinding embrace of national mythology and the darker face of England’s nationhood.