Austerity and Irish women's writing and culture, 1980-2020 / Deirdre Flynn, Ciara L. Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flynn, Deirdre, author.

Murphy, Ciara L., author.

Series:

Routledge Studies in Irish Literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (275 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, New York ; Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, [2022]

Summary:

Austerity and Irish Women's Writing and Culture, 1980-2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women's writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women's writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, ​and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series Information

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

1 Irish Women's Writing and Culture Under the Shadow of Austerity

Cycles of Boom and Bust: Austerity as Violence

Social Change

Irish Women's Writing and Austerity

Woman as Nation

Pregnancy and Motherhood

Waking the Feminists: A Women's Protest

Chapter Outlines

Austerity, Feminism, and Conflict

Arts and Austerity

Race and Austerity

Spaces of Austerity

Notes

Works Cited

Section 1 Austerity, Feminism, and Conflict

2 Two Opposing Narratives?: The Field Day and LIP Pamphlets

Disparate Fields of Power: The Field Day (1983-1988) and LIP Pamphlets (1989-1992)

Overcoming Austerity By Opening Up the Irish Cultural Sphere

Upholding and Dismantling Austerity: The Habitus of the Field Day and LIP Pamphlets

"Compositional Codes": The LIP and Field Day Pamphlets

The Aftermath of the Field Day Anthology I-III

3 Austerity, Conflict, and Second-Wave Feminism in the North of Ireland

Introduction

Forming Charabanc Theatre Company

Illuminating Shared Herstories

Second-Wave Feminism On the Island of Ireland

Feminist Politics and the Female Gaze

Consciousness-Raising Through Performance

Artistic and Commercial Success

Conclusion

4 #WakeUpIrishPoetry: Austerity and Activism in Contemporary Irish Poetry - A Personal Reflection

Interlude: Reflections From the Background(s), Or the Hall of Mirrors, Or How We See Ourselves Disappear

Is This Where I Start?

Is This Where I Start?.

Background(s)

Fired!

MEAS - Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector

Interlude: [silence]

Foregrounds

Wake Up Irish Poetry

SAOI - Safe Arts of Ireland

Foresisters: A Word On Feminist Grassroots Activism in the Irish Arts

Section 2 Arts and Austerity

5 Kermit, Cows, and Headless Chickens: Women's Comedy Monologues After the Tiger

Little Gem

Charolais

Pondling

Note

6 Balancing Acts: From Survival to Sustainability in Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Introduction: On Balance

The Problem: Theatre Against the Odds

Theatre57: 'Female, 30s, No Children, Pays €512 Rent Per Month' (Who We Are 2018)

Cultural Currency and Struggling Artists: Precarious Lives in Fortress Europe

Conclusion: Acts of Balance in Creative Futures

Section 3 Race and Austerity

7 Intersectionality in Contemporary Melodrama: Normal People (McDonald/Abrahamson, 2020)...

Kissing Candice: Fantasy, Nihilism and Interracial Romance

Normal People: Precarity, Multiraciality and Emotional Capitalism

8 Austerity and the Precarity of Whiteness: Polish Characters in Stacey Gregg's Shibboleth (2015)...

'Look Out for the Lads': Shibboleth and the Precarity of Working-Class Whiteness

'Other People's Politics': Middle-Class Whiteness and the Privilege of Invisibility in Here Comes the Night

9 Black Irish Culture

Who Gets to Be Irish?

Shared Colonial History

Celtic Tiger and the Changing Nature of Who Gets to Be Irish

Citizenship Imagery

2004 Citizenship Referendum

Austerity Through the Lens of the African Woman

African Presence in Ireland During Celtic Tiger

New Strategies for a New Ireland

Irish Essentialism.

Blackness and Its Threat to Irishness

Fear of the Black Body

Media and Racist Backlash

Taking Up Space

Section 4 Spaces of Austerity

10 Austerity, Irish Literary Tropes, and Claire Keegan's Fiction

Reconsidering Realism and Irish Literary Tropes in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Antarctica, Entrapment, and the Romance Plot

Tentative Breakthrough, Female Agency, and Bildungsroman

11 Celtic Tiger Saga Fiction: Patricia Scanlan's City Girls and Marian Keyes' Walsh Family

Irish Women's Popular Fiction: From Scanlan to Keyes

Patricia Scanlan's City Girl

Marian Keyes' Walsh Sisters

12 'Just the Way It Is': Portraits of Austerity in Short Fiction By Women From the North of Ireland

Austerity and Gender: Louise Kennedy

Austerity and Youth: Lucy Caldwell and Wendy Erskine

13 Motherhood, Referendums and Austerity in Contemporary Irish Women's Writing

Divorce

The Eighth Amendment

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-00-320747-2

1-000-58833-5

1-003-20747-2

1-000-58835-1

9781003207474

OCLC:

1321786556