Deirdre Flynn

Ciara L. Murphy

Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980-2020 focuses on the underrepresented 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 through a multi-medium 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. Twelve essays, 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 across form 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.

Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020

Eugene O'Brien

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

Representations of Loss in Irish Literature

Maria Beville

This collection is the first to examine how the city is written in modern Irish fiction. Focusing on the multi-faceted, layered, and ever-changing topography of the city in Irish writing, it brings together studies of Irish and Northern Irish fictions which contribute to a more complete picture of modern Irish literature and Irish urban cultural identities. It offers a critical introduction to the Irish city as it represented in fiction as a plural space to mirror the plurality of contemporary Irish identities north and south of the border. The chapters combine to provide a platform for new research in the field of Irish urban literary studies, including analyses of the fiction of authors including James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Kate O’Brien, Hugo Hamilton, Kevin Barry, and Rosemary Jenkinson. An exciting and diverse range of fictions is introduced and examined with the aim of generating a cohesive perspective on Irish urban fictions and to stimulate further discussion in this emerging area.

Deirdre Flynn

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