Overview

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

Full Product Details

9780198881056

Table of Contents

Reviews

Paige Reynolds's book is consistently insightful into the Irish women's texts it treats and establishes itself at once as a major work in the field. * Anthony Roche, Irish Times * Reynolds's book expands our understanding of Irish writing and modernism while also suggesting further applications beyond studies of modernism and literature by women. The stubborn mode Reynolds uses to parse how older aesthetic models retain their residual cultural status has wide applicability across twentieth-century literary studies, and even those not specializing in contemporary fiction will understand the book as a significant contribution to the new formalisms continuing to shape the fields of literary and cultural studies. * Megan Faragher, Contemporary Literature *

Author Information

Paige Reynolds is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. She writes on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge, 2007). She is the editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016), The New Irish Studies (Cambridge, 2020), and Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (Cambridge, 2020, with Eric Falci).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available