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.

Autorentext

Elke D hoker is a lecturer at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her fields of research include British and Irish fiction, narrative theory and gender studies. Raphaël Ingelbien is a senior lecturer at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His current research focuses on the European contexts of nineteenth-century Irish writing. Hedwig Schwall is a senior lecturer at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests include contemporary Irish literature and psychoanalytic theory.

Inhalt

Contents: Elke D'hoker/Raphaël Ingelbien/Hedwig Schwall: Introduction - Anne Fogarty: 'I was a Voice': Orality and Silence in the Poetry of Eavan Boland - Margaret Mills Harper: 'The Real Thing': Body Parts and the Zero Institution in Ní Chuilleanáin's Poetry - Lucy Collins: Joyful Mysteries: Language and Spirituality in Medbh McGuckian's Recent Poetry - Niamh Hehir: 'I have grown inside words/Into a state of unbornness': Evocations of a Pre-linguistic Space of Meaning in Medbh McGuckian's Poetry - Mária Kurdi: Narrating Across Borders: From Gendered Experience of Trauma to Subject Transformation in Monologues by Irish Women Playwrights - Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin: 'The seeds beneath the snow': Resignation and Resistance in Teresa Deevy's Wife to James Whelan - Faith Binckes/Kathryn Laing: A Vagabond's Scrutiny: Hannah Lynch in Europe - Maureen O'Connor: 'I'm meat for no butcher!': The Female and the Species in Irish Women's Writing - Eve Eisenberg: 'And then the sausages were ordered': Jewishness, Irishness and Othering in Castle Rackrent - Christina Morin: Undermining Morality? National Destabilisation in The Wild Irish Girl and Corinne ou L'Italie - Catherine Smith: 'Words! Words! Words!': Interrogations of Language and History in Emily Lawless's With Essex in Ireland - Kathryn Johnson: 'Phantasmagoric Hinterlands': Adolescence and Anglo-Ireland in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart - Tina O'Toole: Unregenerate Spirits: The Counter-Cultural Experiments of George Egerton and Elizabeth Bowen - Sylvie Mikowski: Deirdre Madden's Novels: Searching for Authentic Woman - Adriana Bebiano: 'Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know': The Stories of Chicago May and Eliza Lynch - Giovanna Tallone: 'Once Upon a Time': Fabulists and Storytellers in Clare Boylan's Fiction - Ann Owens Weekes: Towards Her Own History: A Century of Irish Women's Fiction.