Overview

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O'Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history - the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act - were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism's engagement with sex, health, and the body.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston (SSHRC-CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in English, SSHRC-CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in English, University of Alberta)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.50cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.20cm
Weight:   0.514kg
ISBN:  

9780192889492

ISBN 10:   0192889494
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   23 February 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health Part I: Scandalous Autonomy 1: 'Bred out of the contagion of the throng': Irish Modernism, Sexual Health, and the Parnell Myth 2: 'Survival of the unfittest': Synge, Yeats, and the Rhetoric of Health Part II: Hygiene and its Discontents 3: 'Their syphilisation you mean': Irish Modernism and the Politics of Venereal Disease Part III: Heredity and Fertility 4: 'Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter': Beckett, Censorship, and Fertility 5: 'But perhaps this new child will be perfect!': Kate O'Brien's Eugenic Romances Part IV: Sexual Health and Exhaustion 6: 'Veni, V.D., Vici!': Flann O'Brien, Sexual Health, and the Exhaustion of Irish Modernism

Reviews

With Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, Lloyd Meadhbh Houston can be said to have done medical historians and scholars of Irish literature a profound service. * Reading Ireland * This is a rigorous, accessible and mischievously subversive study of the rhetoric of sexual health in Ireland that will enlighten and entertain its readers. * Irish Literary Supplement * [T]imely in its publication, unique in its scope, exhaustive in its subject-matter, and useful for scholars across a variety of disciplines ... indispensable for scholars of Irish literature and history. * The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O'Brien Studies * Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health provides a crucial picture of the intensity of gendering biopolitics that informed political discourse, narratives of heredity and health, and literary production during a formative period of Irish history. Moreover, it establishes an excellent framework for scholarship, both within and beyond modernism, to examine in literature and history the horrific, buried realities that the discourses discussed here helped to create. * Abby Bender, Journal of British Studies *

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health is a valuable text for any scholar who is interested in the intersections between Irish writing and Medical Humanities...Lloyd (Meadbh) Houston can be said to have done medical historians and scholars of Irish literature a profound service. * Reading Ireland Volume 18 *

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health is a valuable text for any scholar who is interested in the intersections between Irish writing and Medical Humanities...Lloyd (Meadbh) Houston can be said to have done medical historians and scholars of Irish literature a profound service. * Reading Ireland Volume 18 * ...enlighten and entertain its readers. * Irish Literary Supplement * [T]imely in its publication, unique in its scope, exhaustive in its subject-matter, and useful for scholars across a variety of disciplines ... indispensable for scholars of Irish literature and history. * The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O'Brien Studies *

Author Information

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC-CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta and Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Their research explores the cultural politics of sexual health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has been featured in publications including the Review of English Studies, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and the Irish Times.

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