Most innovations eventually find their way to Ireland, and so, Irish literature is at last being examined from a gender perspective. The eight essays consider works ranging from the Old Irish version of Diedre, through Dracula, Yeats, Beckett, and others, to a current television series. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women’s life writing in a specifically Irish context. By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women’s narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.

This collection of essays focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in Irish history, biography, language, literature and drama. While the contributors employ a variety of methodological and critical perspectives, they share the conviction that the gendering of Ireland - not only of the nation, but of actual Irish men and women - is a construction of culture and ideology and not simply one of nature.

This study analyzes the role of gender in Irish cultural change from the 1890s to the present, exploring literature, the relationships between gender and national identities, and the recognized major political and cultural movements of the twentieth century. It includes discussion of film, television and, popular music, as well as diverse literary texts by authors such as Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, and Boland.

The essays collected in this volume reflect on and interrogate representations of gender and space in a range of literary texts and cultural artefacts and put forward a diverse and suggestive array of interpretations that draw out the salience of these two foundational but vexed constructs. In conversation with the influential criticism of Patricia Coughlan, they examine the portrayal of sibling relations, illness and trauma, the connections between mothers and daughters, and constructions of masculinity and of feminist subjects from the medieval to the contemporary periods. Drawing out aspects of the politics of space, these essays also engage with the depiction of whiteness in early modern colonial writing about Brazil, concepts of the pastoral, the urban ghost, the city and alienation, the maritime and queer ecology, the letters of female emigrants to Argentina and the ecopoetics of domestic architecture. Engaging with a wide array of genres and historical periods, this volume offers incisive and illuminating analyses of texts from the early modern to the contemporary periods.