Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction: The Literary Legacy of 'Mother Ireland'

by Ellen Scheible, Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Editor), Jennifer Gustar (Editor)

Overview

Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, this book provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland.

Scheible dissects the ways that 'the woman-as-symbol' remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of sexuality and gender that characterized Irish culture during the twentieth century.

Examining works by Elizabeth Bowen, Pamela Hinkson, Emma Donoghue, Tana French, Sally Rooney and James Joyce, this book demonstrates that the definition of Irish nationhood in our contemporary experience of capitalism and biopolitics is dependent on the intertwining and paradoxical tropes of a traditional, yet equally sexual, feminine identity which has been quelled by violence and reproduction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350429109
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/09/2025
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women's Writing
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts.

Jennifer Gustar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research currently focusses on contemporary women writers, with special interest in writers of diaspora. She is North American reviews editor for Contemporary Women Writers and has published on a range of women fiction writers such as Anita Rau Badami, Bernardine Evaristo, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Knox.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Body Politics in the (Home) Nation
Chapter 1: Mirroring and the Female Body in James Joyce
Chapter 2: The Danger of the Domestic Body: Bridget Cleary, Big House Modernism, and Tana French
Chapter 3: Reflection, Anxiety, and the Feminized Body: The Contemporary Irish Gothic
Chapter 4: Bildung and the Non-reproductive Female Body in Contemporary Irish Women's Writing
Chapter 5: “Boneless, Grotesque”: Institutionalized Masculinity and Female Containment in Tana French's The Witch Elm
Chapter 6: Normal People, Then and Now: James Joyce and Sally Rooney
Conclusion
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a timely and valuable book. The texts under discussion are well-chosen, the prose is admirably lucid and the analysis is illuminating.” —Ailbhe Darcy, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Cardiff University, UK

From the Publisher