Irish Literature

Contributors

Claire Bracken is a lecturer in the English Department at Union College, Schenectady, New York, where she teaches Irish Studies. Her research considers the meanings of Irish feminist theory in the specific context of contemporary social and cultural change in Ireland. She is particularly interested in the fiction of Anne Enright and Claire Kilroy and the experimental poetry of Catherine Walsh, as well as Kirsten Sheridan’s and Pat Murphy’s film-making. She has published on Irish women's writing and contemporary Irish popular culture.

Kathryn Conrad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas. Her book, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), addresses the centrality of gender and sexuality to national identity and nationalist discourses in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her current research is focused on visual culture, surveillance, and space in Northern Ireland.

Kathy D'Arcy is currently conducting doctoral research in the English Department at University College, Cork on the lives, works and reception of Irish women poets of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

Elke D’hoker is a postdoctoral researcher with the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders and she teaches at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She has written a critical study on John Banville, Visions of Alterity (Rodopi, 2004), and has published articles about Irish fiction in Irish University Review, Critique, Modern Fiction Studies and Contemporary Literature. Her current research project investigates the modern short story by women writers.

Borbála Faragó is an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral fellow at University College Dublin. She is the author of a number of articles on contemporary Irish poetry and is preparing a monograph on Medbh McGuckian’s work. A collection of essays, co-edited with Moynagh Sullivan, entitled Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland, will be published by Cambridge Scholars in 2008.

Heidi Hansson is Professor of English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her main research interest is women’s literature, and she has previously published in the fields of postmodern romance, nineteenth-century women’s cross-gendered writing, and Irish women’s literature. She has recently completed a full-length examination of the nineteenth-century writer Emily Lawless, Emily Lawless 1845-1913: Writing the Interspace (Cork University Press, 2007) and the edited collection Irish Nineteenth-Century Women’s Prose: New Contexts and Readings (Cork University Press, 2008). She is also the leader of an interdisciplinary project about foreign travellers to northern Scandinavia in the nineteenth century, and is working on a study of gendered writing about the region.

Bríona Nic Dhiarmada is the Notre Dame Chair of Irish and Concurrent Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, where she was previously Senior Fulbright Scholar in Irish Language and Literature (2007-2008) and Naughton Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Professor (2006). Her full length study of the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Téacs Baineann, Téacs Mná, her critical book on the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, was awarded the Merriman Prize for Irish Language Academic Book of the Year. Among her other publications are Téacs agus Comhthéacs (with M. Ní Annracháin), Cork University Press 1998, as well as various articles on Irish cultural studies and contemporary Irish-language writing. She was a contributing editor to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vols. IV & V and is a contributor to the Cambridge History of Irish Literature (Kellegher, O’Leary eds, 2006). She is also the author of over thirty-five screen plays and ten documentaries and in 2007 she won the Media Award for Best Television Program in Ireland

Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a lecturer in the English Department at University College, Cork. She is the author of Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (2005). She has contributed to three volumes in the Pickering and Chatto series Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, and has published articles on nineteenth-century Irish and women's writing.

Giovanna Tallone is a graduate in Modern Languages from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, and holds a PhD in English Studies form the University of Florence. An EFL teacher, she is currently attached to the Department of English at Università Cattolica, Milan. She has presented papers at several IASIL conferences and has published articles and critical reviews on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Mary Lavin, Angela Bourke, Brian Friel, James Stephens, and Seamus Heaney. Her research interests include Irish women writers, contemporary Irish drama, and the remakes of Old Irish legends.

Acknowledgements

This collection was inspired by a set of feminist panels we co-convened at the 2004 IASIL Conference at NUI Galway on ‘Irish Writing and Contemporary Feminist Scholarship’. We would like to acknowledge all the participants in those original panels: the innovative scholarly research and critical vitality of the sessions drew a large audience during the conference itself, and has provoked collaborative work since, including this collection. We would like to thank the conference organizers Riana O’Dwyer and Patrick Lonergan for their ready support, both in facilitating these panels and in the publication of this collection. We thank the National University of Ireland for a grant in aid of publication. We are very grateful to all the contributors for their cheerful and flexible co-operation in the protracted process of production, but especially, of course for the high standard of their essays. We are privileged to have had the benefit of their scholarship and professionalism in compiling the volume.

We express our warm thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewers who responded promptly and perceptively to our requests, and in particular, to the two readers of the whole volume at its penultimate stage, who were so generous with their time and energy. We thank Eamonn Jordan, Lilian Chambers, and Barbara Brown at Carysfort Press, and everyone who has worked on the book: it has also been greatly enhanced by the artist Gwen O’Dowd’s generous permission to use one of the pieces from her ‘Uaimh’ series as part of the cover design.

Our colleagues at the University of Limerick and University College, Cork, and our friends and families, also deserve our appreciation for their support, and we would like to say a special word of thanks to Piaras and Siobhán.

1 | Introduction

Patricia Coughlan

Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St Peter’s Opening the Field. Irish Women: Texts and Contexts (Cork, 2007) has recently gathered essays, mainly by well-established critics, in an important volume aimed to consolidate and continue the major progress recorded by the Field Day women’s volumes: it offers ten chapters each discussing one important Irish woman writer. The present book shares the general aims of Opening the Field, in seeking further to advance the current state of feminist scholarship within the field of Irish literary research and criticism. While it originates in the three challenging and well-attended feminist panels organised at the 2004 IASIL Conference at National University of Ireland, Galway, it has been developed into a larger-scale collection. It differs somewhat from Opening the Field in making available work by later generations of feminist critics, alongside some established voices; in ranging somewhat more widely beyond canonical authors and material; and in offering poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives alongside a range of critical and literary-historical approaches. The contributors, all literary scholars, write from widely-dispersed places, including Italy, the US, Sweden and Belgium, as well as various Irish universities.