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This collection presents international research on the work of Irish women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. These essays make a key contribution to contemporary feminist recovery projects and remapping the landscape of Irish literature of this period.
After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of Irish literature, this collection proposes a reappraisal of Irish women's writing by inviting dialogues with new or hitherto marginalised critical frameworks as well as with foreign and transnational literary traditions. Several essays explore how Irish women writers engaged with European themes and traditions through the genres of travel writing, the historical novel, the monologue and the fairy tale. Other contributions are concerned with the British context in which some texts were published and argue for the existence of Irish inflections of phenomena such as the New Woman, suffragism or vegetarianism. Further chapters emphasise the transnational character of Irish women's writing by applying continental theory and French feminist thinking to various texts; in other chapters new developments in theory are applied to Irish texts for the first time. Casting the efforts of Irish women in a new light, the collection also includes explorations of the work of neglected or emerging authors who have remained comparatively ignored by Irish literary criticism.
Almost the entire corpus of West's fiction receives attention in this volume (with the exception of The Thinking Reed, which is in itself a telling fact)."--Jacket.
The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Frances White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide, but by collaboration and community.
Describing the Irish as 'female' and 'bestial' is a practice dating back to the twelfth century, while for women, inside and outside of Ireland, their association with children, animals and other 'savages' has had a long history. A link among systems of oppression has been asserted in recent decades by some feminists, but linking women's rights with animal advocacy can be controversial. This strategy responds to the fact that women's inferiority has been alleged and justified by appropriating them to nature, an appropriation that colonialism has also practiced on its racial and cultural others. Nineteenth-century feminists braved such associations, for instance, often asserting vegetarianism...
Feminist Theatre Then & Now – Celebrating 50 Years of women theatre makers in the UK and Ireland and their battle to make their voices heard, have their work produced professionally, and promote social justice. Here, the pioneers and leading lights of the newly energised feminist theatre movement continue to fight for an equitable, diverse and inclusive theatre which speaks for all. In 30+ essays, covering three generations, the interviews and essays in this book give important insight into the lived experience of women working in theatre and what it takes to rise in an industry where race, gender, class and parenthood can be serious obstacles to success. Interviews and essays by playwrigh...
What Rough Beasts presents an innovative and diverse collection of new research papers which investigate key literary and historical issues in Irish and Scottish Studies, providing a view onto the range of current research interests both within and across the two disciplines. From a selection of papers presented at an AHRC-sponsored conference held at the University of Aberdeen, the volume showcases original material by both emergent and established scholars. Opening up illuminating conversations between often diverse areas of study, this book covers issues including: poetry and violence; film and drama; history and historiography; ethnography and literature; the politics of representation.
The Irish New Woman explores the textual and ideological connections between feminist, nationalist and anti-imperialist writing and political activism at the fin de siècle . This is the first study which foregrounds the Irish and New Woman contexts, effecting a paradigm shift in the critical reception of fin de siècle writers and their work.
Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of p...
Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world's best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. This study considers the pioneering ways O'Brien represents women's experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work's long anticipation of movements such as #metoo.