Abstract
How can we go beyond historically constructed gender differences, as we read literary genres in the contemporary Irish context? In order to start finding responses to these questions, we aim at looking into how selves are constructed and identities represented as we read Celia de Fréine’s works. Indeed, concepts of identity in postmodernity, represented selves and literary genres, particularly related to the recent Irish literary context are fundamental points of convergence in the understanding of feminisms and literature today. Therefore, this article intends to show how fixed concepts of gender identity and literary genres are, in fact, unstable in contemporaneity. The paralleled, theoretical notions (of gender and genres) matter in the Irish context, because, apart from a few exceptions, women have been excluded from the public literary scene and many of the poets that appeared after the 1970’s account for their condition as women in a patriarchal society. Moreover, it matters due to the proximity of both cases’ unstable condition in our times.Keywords: Contemporary Irish poetry; literary genres; gender; contemporaneity.
Highlights
As an arch-migrant, Roisín O’Donnell moves between mental, spatial and verbal homes, between teaching and writing
When asked to pick an Irish woman writer to discuss in this issue of the ABEI Journal it was hard, but I decided upon Roisín O’Donnell
Sherratt-Bado celebrates her as one of three champions of contemporary magical realism, which is defined by Bernie McGill as a genre which “allows us to examine the everyday challenges that we face in life
Summary
When asked to pick an Irish woman writer to discuss in this issue of the ABEI Journal it was hard, but I decided upon Roisín O’Donnell The reason for this is threefold: she writes beautifully, focuses on problems of identity and she reaches out to the “Other” – mostly transnationals who have difficulties finding their footing in life. Though O’Donnell has only one collection of short stories to date, Wild Quiet (2016), she is well into the second one One of her stories, “How to Build a Space Rocket”, is shortlisted for the 2018 Short Story of the Year Award; another one, “My Patron Saint” was written for Kaleidoscope, an anthology on the Art of Writing which brings together texts by fifty Irish writers.. Othering the other seems a literary exercise in which all the languages that play between parents and children are explored: which body language is being used, how does dress interact with the body; how do gestures become part and parcel of the child’s idiom, how do spatial factors work on his psyche, which kind of verbal abilities does the child develop, which emotional and mental images prove to have a special impact? This article hopes to show how, for each of these six languages (body/skin, sartorial, gestural, spatial, verbal, pellicular) Roisín O’Donnell finds ingenious forms which highlight the complexity of our “crowded selves”
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