Border crossings : Irish women writers and national identities / edited by Kathryn Kirkpatrick.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Irish authors--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--Irish authors.

English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

English literature--Women authors.

National characteristics, Irish, in literature.

Women and literature--Ireland--History.

Women and literature.

Group identity in literature.

Nationalism in literature.

History.

Ireland--In literature.

Ireland.

Physical Description:

ix, 305 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Dublin : Wolfhound Press, 2000.

Summary:

Writing in the shadows of Joyce and Yeats, Irish women have long contributed to the ongoing formation of Irish identities. Border Crossings secures for a largely overlooked body of writing its place in the Irish literary canon.

Ranging from consideration of early writers such as Mafia Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson to recent feminist pamphlet wars. Border Crossings explores the connections between personal and national identities, politics and literary style, and gender and artistic vocation. Some essays focus on prominent writers such as Augusta Gregory and Eavan Boland, and others introduce readers to lesser-known voices such as Emily Lawless and Mary Beckett. Some also show how groups of women, such as upper-middle-class Catholics and lesbians, have used their writing to construct social goals. All help to revise the perception of historical and contemporary roles Irish women writers have played in shaping -- and being shaped by -- Irish history.

By surveying writers of poetry, fiction, drama, and even pamphlets, Border Crossings demonstrates the breadth and vitality of Irish women's writing. It shows that today's Irish women writers have significant foremothers, and more of them than we usually think.

Contents:

Introduction / Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Acts of union: family violence and national courtship in Maria Edgeworth's The absentee and Sydney Owenson's The wild Irish girl / Julia Anne Miller

Forging a tradition: Emily Lawless and the Irish literary canon / James M. Cahalan

"Things which seem to you unfeminine": gender and nationalism in the fiction of some upper middle class Catholic women novelists, 1880-1910 / James H. Murphy

Irish poetry and the modernist canon: a reappraisal of Katharine Tynan / Donna L. Potts

"A woman of the house": gender and nationalism in the writings of Augusta Gregory / Anne Fogarty

A trackless road: Irish nationalisms and lesbian writing / Ann Owens Weekes

Women are trousers / Medbh McGuckian

Revisionist cartography: the politics of place in Boland and Heaney / Katie Conboy

Reproducing the nation: nationalism, reproduction, and paternalism in Anne Devlin's Ourselves alone / Ann Rea

"Instead I said I am a home baker": nationalist ideology and materialist politics in Mary Beckett's Give them stones / Megan Sullivan

Public spaces, private lives: Irish identity and female selfhood in the novels of Jennifer Johnston / Rachael Sealy Lynch

The attic LIPs: feminist pamphleteering for the new Ireland / Katherine Martin Gray.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0863278442

OCLC:

249230544