Bücher der Reihe Studies in Irish Literature, Cinema and Culture

This major new work on significant but neglected or marginalised late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish women writers could not be more timely.  / This collection presents international research on the work of Irish women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering new voices and introducing original perspectives on the lives, works and networks of more familiar literary figures, these essays make a key contribution to contemporary feminist recovery projects and remapping the landscape of Irish literature of this period. / There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary and international field in which a diverse range of hitherto neglected Irish women writers have been recovered, and their lives, works, networks and other contexts illuminated.  Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century capitalises on this rich, diverse and innovative field, drawing on new scholarship that develops existing strands of enquiry further. It also opens up new avenues for exploration. / The strengths of the work is in its seeking of new engagements specifically in relation to Irish women’s cultural economies, particularly literary networks, access to literary production and publication, the long nineteenth century and emergent modernist aesthetics. A further key concern is the politics of retrieval of lost women’s lives and writings, the relationship of Irish feminist critical projects to the ongoing acts of commemoration associated with the formation of the Irish state, and increasing concerns with the future-proofing of ‘lost’ feminist digital recovery projects of the 1990s. / This new collection of original work offers new scholarship about these concerns in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish women’s writing. It draws attention to the significant figure of the Irish New Woman, feminism in the archives, vegetarianism and suffrage, anthologies and the canon, literary and publishing networks, digital methodologies, and women’s writing and intellectual journals, newspaper and periodical histories. / Waking The Feminists, a movement campaigning for better female representation in the arts was established in Ireland in 2015. The launch of ‘Fired!’, a ‘convergence of practising women poets and academics responding to the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) protested against the exclusion of Irish women poets generally from the literary canon, including many who were popular and prolific during the nineteenth century. / Two recently held events – ‘Irish Women Playwrights and Theatremakers’ (2017) and the symposium, “Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women’s Writing (2016) - foregrounded the interest in these areas and the plenitude of new research. The present book draws on work first presented at the editors’ symposium, “Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women’s Writing (1880-1910)” (May Immaculate College, Limerick 2016) where the Irish Women’s Writers Network was also launched.

The commemoration of the Easter Rising centenary in 2016 posed the key question of whether - leaving aside the revolutionary decade (1913-1923) - it was appropriate to talk about a "revolutionary Ireland". The revolutionary decade brought about a change of governance and led to Ireland's independence, but the new Irish Free State fell short of the proclaimed intentions of the imagined republic. The new state veered away from the influence of labour and socialism to become an institutional replica, and a staunchly socially conservative one, of the British system. It was only from the 1960s onwards that Irish society started to open itself up to more liberating social practices and patterns. This volume offers entirely new work which highlights the historical moments at which it would be possible to talk about a political or social revolution in Ireland, while also considering that in the years when Ireland became "the Celtic Tiger", certain social involutions took place. The contributors include independent researchers who write about their topics within a theoretically informed, scholarly, framework. Yet it is precisely their independence from academia that provides their chapters with fresh and multidisciplinary perspectives. Others are well established scholars. It is precisely the wealth of approaches and of disciplines (history, sociology, film studies and literary studies) that enriches the volume and broadens the scope. This volume discusses the idea of revolution in Ireland from a multi- and inter-disciplinary perspective. It covers, on the one hand, the political revolution, mainly the Easter Rising 1916, and on the other the social transformations that the country underwent following the claims for civil rights and the sexual revolution of the late 1960s both in the USA and Europe. Changes in Northern Ireland resulting from the cease fire declaration of the IRA in 1994 are also examined. The kind of state - its conservative political regime and social configuration - that emerged after independence points towards the potentially oxymoronic nature of the phrase "revolutionary Ireland." Yet Ireland's European location has made the country easily permeable to external influences. These, when allied with Ireland's process of modernisation, managed to rupture social strictures. Yet, while patterns in religious practice, gender roles and sexuality have inexorably moved towards much more liberal standards, during the decade known as "Celtic Tiger Ireland" the country experienced an involutionary process as regards racism and discrimination against emigrants and asylum seekers. These studies approach the Easter Rising and the revolutionary period from different perspectives and methodologies: archival research, oral history, postcolonial analysis of documentaries on the Easter Rising, critical discourse analysis of witness statements and research into gendered violence in the Easter Rising aftermath. From this history-based section, the volume shifts to social and cultural issues mainly as refracted and articulated through literature and film: the ground breaking literary work of Edna O'Brien, the shifting grounds for masculinity in Roddy Doyle's The Van, the radical changes in cinematic representations of the Northern Troubles following the IRA's cease fire, Evelyn Conlon's vindication of women's historical voices and presence, and research into Direct Provision Centres. The volume ends with an interview to political activist and page and performer poet Sarah Clancy and the inclusion of two unpublished poems by her.

This major new work on significant but neglected or marginalised late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish women writers could not be more timely. / This collection presents international research on the work of Irish women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering new voices and introducing original perspectives on the lives, works and networks of more familiar literary figures, these essays make a key contribution to contemporary feminist recovery projects and remapping the landscape of Irish literature of this period. / There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary and international field in which a diverse range of hitherto neglected Irish women writers have been recovered, and their lives, works, networks and other contexts illuminated. Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century capitalises on this rich, diverse and innovative field, drawing on new scholarship that develops existing strands of enquiry further. It also opens up new avenues for exploration. / The strengths of the work is in its seeking of new engagements specifically in relation to Irish women's cultural economies, particularly literary networks, access to literary production and publication, the long nineteenth century and emergent modernist aesthetics. A further key concern is the politics of retrieval of lost women's lives and writings, the relationship of Irish feminist critical projects to the ongoing acts of commemoration associated with the formation of the Irish state, and increasing concerns with the future-proofing of 'lost' feminist digital recovery projects of the 1990s. / This new collection of original work offers new scholarship about these concerns in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish women's writing. It draws attention to the significant figure of the Irish New Woman, feminism in the archives, vegetarianism and suffrage, anthologies and the canon, literary and publishing networks, digital methodologies, and women's writing and intellectual journals, newspaper and periodical histories. / Waking The Feminists, a movement campaigning for better female representation in the arts was established in Ireland in 2015. The launch of 'Fired!', a 'convergence of practising women poets and academics responding to the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) protested against the exclusion of Irish women poets generally from the literary canon, including many who were popular and prolific during the nineteenth century. /Two recently held events - 'Irish Women Playwrights and Theatremakers' (2017) and the symposium, "Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women's Writing (2016) - foregrounded the interest in these areas and the plenitude of new research. The present book draws on work first presented at the editors' symposium, "Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women's Writing (1880-1910)" (May Immaculate College, Limerick 2016) where the Irish Women's Writers Network was also launched.

This significant new work redraws the lines of understanding around the literary networks of mid-to-late 20th Century Ireland, particularly between Dublin and Belfast. Such a direct and personal connection between the literary bohemia of Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien, and the world of the Honest Ulsterman at the start of The Troubles has never previously been made.This book brings to light, for the first time, the creative writing of Gerard Keenan - better known by his pseudonym 'Jude the Obscure', under which he wrote a regular column for the influential Northern Irish periodical The Honest Ulsterman for over three decades. He was also a contributor to Lagan and Envoy, and to Kavanagh's Weekly.The fictionalised biographical nature of Keenan's stories, written over the course of 40 years provides a unique depiction of Belfast as an artistic, literary and bohemian centre - a representation largely missing from popular and academic consciousness.Dr. Gallacher provides a major introduction as well as the texts of a series of Keenan's unpublished biographical short stories. These are drawn from a significant cache of his private papers to which he holds exclusive access. They range in subject matter from accounts of his association with Dublin's literary bohemia, particularly his tempestuous friendship with Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh and his time as a contributor to Kavanagh's Weekly, to his role in the founding of the Belfast Arts Theatre.This material is supplemented by a small but significant selection of long forgotten work published by Keenan under his real name in the 1940s and 1950s. This facilitates a strong positioning of Keenan alongside several significant moments in Irish literary history. This is underpinned by the extensive critical introduction that defines both the perimeters of Keenan's place within the Irish literary tradition, as well as establishing the corridors of connectivity through which his interaction with bohemian Dublin and subsequently The Honest Ulsterman were developed.The work offers explicit, thematic and stylistic connections between the two literary eras from the interplay between Keenan's early work for Envoy and the unpublished material utilised and presented in the volume for the first time. In addition, a significant battery of personal letters between Keenan and the H.U editors, Michael Foley, James Simmons and Robert Johnstone is presented within the book's introduction to highlight the extent to which the group sought to draw on and adapt the literary approaches of Kavanagh et al to facilitate a transcendence of the brutal realities of 1970s Belfast.This book is intended for scholars of both Irish literature and history, as well as those engaged in the study of peace building and conflict studies, given Keenan's representation of Belfast as a city possessed of more than sectarian antagonism. The joint presentation of original literary fiction alongside a weighty academic introduction will appeal to those involved directly in the academic study of Irish culture, and those with a more general interest in the literature and history of 20th-Century Ireland.