Heather Ingman

Lovers and Dancers

Clíona Ó Gallchoir

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of writing by women in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. It covers literature in all genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as life-writing and unpublished writing, and addresses work in both English and Irish. The chapters are authored by leading experts in their field, giving readers an introduction to cutting edge research on each period and topic. Survey chapters give an essential historical overview, and are complemented by a focus on selected topics such as the short story, and key figures whose relationship to the narrative of Irish literary history is analysed and reconsidered. Demonstrating the pioneering achievements of a huge number of many hitherto neglected writers, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature makes a critical intervention in Irish literary history.

A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature

Heather Ingman's study argues that reading twentieth-century Irish women's fiction in the light of Kristeva's theories of nationhood places Irish women at the heart of writing about the nation and demonstrates that the political dimension of their fiction has often been underestimated. Her book is an important contribution to the study of gender in Irish writing that changes the way we view Irish women's writing.

Nation and Gender

Twentieth-century Fiction by Irish Women

Taking six key writers of the inter-war period, this original study looks at the way they explore the mother-daughter relationship, finding in it a key to their identity as women and asartists. Providing in-depth critical analyses of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Rose Macaulay and Jean Rhys, this study for the first time enables you to draw parallels between their work and that of female psychoanalysts Hélène Deutsch, Melanie Klein and Karen Horney during the inter-war period. It combines theoretical and textual criticism within a specific historical context in an especially useful way. The book concludes that these writers look to the mother to empower them and challenges the view of the mother as a regressive influence.

Mothers, Daughters and Writing

Women's Fiction Between the Wars

Age is a missing category in Irish literary criticism and this book is the first to explore a range of familiar and not so familiar Irish texts through a gerontological lens. Drawing on the latest writing in humanistic, critical and cultural gerontology, this study examines the portrayal of ageing in fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Deirdre Madden, Anne Enright, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, John McGahern, Norah Hoult and Edna O’Brien, among others. The chapters follow a logical thematic progression from efforts to hold back time, to resisting the decline narrative of ageing, solitary ageing versus ageing in the community, and dementia and the world of the bedbound and dying. One chapter analyses the changing portrayal of older people in the Irish short story. Recent demographic shifts in Ireland have focused attention on an increasing ageing population, making this study a timely intervention in the field of literary gerontology.

Heather Ingman

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