Refashioning Modernism

Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously declares: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’1 Like Joyce himself, a number of the metropolitan, modernist women discussed elsewhere in this volume appeared to do just that; indeed, their flouting of rooted national identities was often at the heart of their self-conscious literary experimentation. Juxtaposed with such escapees are those others who chose to embrace nationality, language, and religion, not as nets to restrict but as ties to bind them to their countries, physically or imaginatively. Irish, Scottish, and Welsh women writers of this period are, arguably, particularly susceptible to making this choice, though their concern with nation and language, if not always with religion, does not necessarily entail the resistance to change which Joyce and his fictional creation were clearly seeking to avoid.

This chapter focuses on Irish women writers and their contributions to supernatural fiction from c.1850-1950. The chapter examines how women incorporated social themes in their short fiction, an emphasis that often differentiates these narratives from ones written by men through the utilization of distinct Irish settings, Irish historical moments, and the foregrounding of the lives of Irish women. These writers responded to rapid social and political changes by creating literary ghosts that reflected contemporary concerns about marriage, domestic abuse, women and children, haunted houses, money and property, colonialism, poverty, and war. The chapter discusses how these themes evolved from the Victorian period into the twentieth century and how Irish women writers described the changing role of women through the lens of the supernatural. The authors surveyed cover a broad range of Gothic writing, including folk horror, the macabre, comic Gothic, and more traditional ghost stories. Authors discussed include Elizabeth Bowen, Bithia Mary Croker, Clotilde Graves, Dorothy Macardle, L. T. Meade, Rosa Mulholland, Charlotte Riddell, Dora Sigerson Shorter, and Katharine Tynan.

Introduction: The Lonely Voice There have been some notable, if gradual, changes in many aspects of Irish women's role and life in general since other emerged in Irish society in the post-Eamon De Valera period from the 1960s. It is evident, possibly inevitable, that these changes in Irish women's lives are echoed in contemporary Irish women's stories, some writers of which are self-declared feminists or have engaged actively with the Irish women's movement. (1) Consequently, their literary works tend to be gynocentric, concerned overtly with women's issues and seek explicitly to give voice to women's quest for justice within male-dominated Irish society. This essay evaluates a recurrent motif in stories by Clare Boylan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Stella Mahon, Mary Dorcey and Marilyn McLaughlin, the motif of quest. As opposed to the traditionally male genre of the monomyth or Bildungsroman, Irish women's quest motif is about a heroine who embarks on a different kind of adventure with the aim of achieving a different kind of goal. (2) This female quest involves subversion of the social norm, rebellion against a socially prescribed role and destiny, and reclamation of a lost place within Irish society. This essay argues that Irish women's stories serve both as a vibrant narrative genre within Irish literary tradition, and as a strategic device by Irish women writers who are seeking to engage with a collective, and evolving, Irish feminist awareness. Typically, such stories focus on women who start by accepting passively a socially imposed role and life as wife or mother, subsequently become bad by diverging from the traditional patriarchal view of women's role in Irish society, and undergo, ultimately, a transformative inner journey of self-discovery which leads them towards emotional independence and individuality. The short story genre as a strategic narrative device for Irish women has roots in Ireland's literary tradition and heritage. According to Frank O'Connor, the short story in an Irish literary context is a natural form deriving from the Irish storytelling tradition embedded in the Irish psyche (Casey 1990: 9), a genre associated closely with Irish history as well as with Irish women's writing. The short story is considered to be a natural progression of story-telling, letter-writing, diary-keeping, and even school essay-writing, forms of writing with which women were already familiar in their lives (Madden-Simpson 1984: 13, 18). The skills and techniques inherent in the short story medium are also relevant when seeking to reach a broad and diverse audience through printed, visual or social media. (3) Traditionally, the short story also plays an essential role in Irish culture and politics. (4) O'Connor argues also that the short story is a vital expressive tool for the population of a country, such as Ireland, in a post-colonial state (O'Connor 1963: 20). In the light of Frank O'Connor's view, Colm Toibin, echoed by Boada-Montagut, connects the prominence of the Irish short story to Ireland's status as a country with a broken and traumatic past. (5) Toibin's or Boada-Montagut's association of a political discourse with the short story genre may suggest a reason for the significant appeal of the short story genre within contemporary Irish women's writing. The short story serves Irish women's purpose of expression because, among the submerged population, Irish women as the Double Other have actually experienced the legacy of a double dispossession (Edge 1998: 215-6; Boada-Montagut 2003: 10). (6) Within the male-dominated Irish literary canon and tradition, women's writing has tended to be marginalised. (7) In this essay we suggest that Irish women may find the short story both an effective and also an instinctive way of expressing varied issues related to women as well as a medium which offers fresh scope for women to create a distinctive style of literature, a literature of their own (Boada-Montagut 2003: 38). …

This article explores the relationship between the Irish woman writer and exile and return in Edna O'Brien's recent novel The Light of Evening (2006). This work, dedicated as it is ‘To my mother and my motherland’, represents a new chapter in O'Brien's configuration of the connection between the Irish woman writer and the image of Ireland as a place from which escape is a necessary step towards creative freedom. The Light of Evening contains a web of subtle allusions that invite a reading of the novel as a statement of O'Brien's allegiances with the English and Irish literary traditions. Ultimately, however, it foregrounds the quotidian world of the main character's home place—one represented fully in her mother's letters—as the key source of inspiration for the Irish woman writer. The article examines how relationships with the literary past are mapped onto familial ties in the novel, as O'Brien seems to move away from the Joycean promise of creative exile towards a more hopeful reading of the relationship between the Irish woman writer and her ‘motherland’.

Collaborations and networks are both the modus operandi and focus of investigation in this Special Issue on Irish women writers between 1880 and 1940. This introductory essay sets the scene for the discussions and investigations that follow: we theorise the importance of collaboration and networks for understanding Irish women's writing and publishing, and highlight how contributors draw on extensive archival research that enables the tracing of the intersecting nodes, webs, and relationships between collaborations and networks. The Special Issue platforms the study of Irish women within collaborative sibling, spousal and other partnerships and within the context of movements, organisations, and networks. Our co-authored introduction, a product of our own feminist collaborative approach developed during the project, asserts that as the process of recovery of Irish women's writing continues, the collaborative and networked aspects of women's cultural productions become more central and significant. Their retrieval demands a suite of methodologies alongside a collective approach that pools resources, insights, and knowledge networks.

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode examines the tangled relationship between Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women’s fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of works being commended for their innovative deployment of tactics drawn from early twentieth-century modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across nearly a century, writers from Kate O’Brien to Sally Rooney have restyled modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of individual consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenacious imperatives of church and state in Ireland and Northern Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, the ordered narrative of the book. Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, and Claire-Louise Bennett are among those who employ the modernist mode to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, gender bias, political violence, and sexual abuse. The lessons offered by modernism in such fiction, as assiduous close readings reveal, are often distressing. The stubborn problems depicted by the stubborn mode are often exhaustive (this problem is everywhere), exhausted (we’ve seen it a million times), and exhausting (and yet it continues).

This is the first book to explore Irish women’s novels and the representation of Paris, which draws these writers into a recognizably European literary tradition. By reasserting the centrality of Paris, this book draws connections between Irish women writers and European writers, forging new points of contact between Irish literature and canonical figures like Goethe, Balzac, and Zola through the shared interest in the socio-economic development of modernity. The European Metropolis not only expands the map of Irish Studies, but also to expand the canon of and the critical framework in which scholars situate these novels. Moreover, this book expands our critical understanding of the urban and female spheres of the modern metropolis.

The 1980s were a landmark period for Irish women's poetry, yet women poets were routinely excluded from the mainstream of Irish poetry production and reception. The publication of the Field Day Anthology I–III (1991) revealed with clarity the gendered dynamics of centre and periphery, with the inclusion of almost no contemporary Irish women writers in its 4,044 double-columned pages causing great controversy. The Field Day Anthology I–III was just one symptom of an inherently male-focused Irish literary tradition, however. With the backdrop of the 1980s Irish economic recession, this chapter will examine some of the networks and conversations surrounding Irish culture that preceded this publication to identify how such exclusion might occur. The Field Day Pamphlets (1983–88) and LIP Pamphlets (1989–92) will be employed to demonstrate how two opposing narratives existed within Irish culture during this period, one that sought to address the historic and contemporary exclusion of Irish women writers and another that continued to promote a male-focused literary tradition that positioned woman as passive object rather than an active creator. This dynamic will be used to illustrate how deep-rooted masculinist conservatism persisted within the authoritative structures and canon-forming institutions of the Irish literary community until as late as the 1990s.

S    twentieth-century Irish women’s writing can make use of a rich body of single author monographs, intellectual biographies, and insightful critical articles as well as the wealth of material provided in volumes  and  of The Field Day Anthology of IrishWriting. A number of these studies address the biographical links between twentieth-century Irish women writers and influential modernists, informing readers, for instance, that Maud Gonne encountered the Futurist Valentine de St. Point in Paris, or that Mary Colum hobnobbed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Elinor Wylie in America. But few address in any sustained way how these writers engaged with modernist imperatives. In recent years, Elizabeth Bowen has been situated convincingly among the pantheon of modernists.1 However, with a few notable exceptions, experimental Irish women writers like Brigid

Irish women’s local colour fiction should be analysed in relation to three levels of literary brokerage: dedication, reviewing, and translation. This becomes clear from the case studies of Jane Barlow and Katharine Tynan, who moved in the same literary circles, a network of Irish authors during the 1880s and 1890s who recorded regional ways of life in their fiction and poetry. What has remained underexplored is how these two women – by referencing each other’s writings and by dedicating their work to each other and other women writers – actively helped to shape the parameters of an Irish version of local colour literature on both sides of the Atlantic. This study will address how local colour literature developed through networks between Irish women writers, and especially through the ways in which they reviewed each other’s work. Additionally, this article makes a case for an extension of our perception of female literary networks in terms of transnational distribution. It looks at translators, an often neglected group of female literary agents at the time, who in the case of Irish regional literature played a pivotal role in disseminating these women writers’ works outside Ireland.

This thesis examines the Women Writers' Club and the significant contribution of women writers to Irish literary and print culture during the period 1930-1960. It reveals a network of female writers and publishers who influenced the production and reception of texts and the affiliations which shaped contemporary cultural practices. As illustrated in my ‘Web of Women Writers’, these associative networks connected diverse female authors and facilitated their engagement with important social and political issues. The women authors who formed the membership of the Women Writers’ Club established a ‘Book of the Year’ award. This literary prize generated a corpus of women’s writing, a compilation of a rich body of work which reflected the ethos of this women-centred club. Furthermore, my thesis examines the leading role which women writers played in mainstream and periodical publishing. Using a case history approach, I offer the first full account of the feminist private printing press, The Gayfield Press, assessing critically the aesthetic vision of its owners. I also consider the social and political coding within the texts it produced. In addition to discussing publishing practices, my thesis also considers the reading practices of a dissident cultural elite through a case history study of an intellectual woman of the period. Finally, this thesis contextualizes the Women Writers’ Club within a broader artistic milieu which includes the United Arts Club, Irish P.E.N and the Irish Academy of Letters. It also offers the first account of Irish P.E.N and the role of women writers within this club. In conclusion, this thesis challenges the notion of a hegemonic male?dominated literary scene, opens up new avenues for investigation into the role of cultural clubs in Irish history and offers a fresh perspective on women writers in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century.

Ageing is a fundamental part of our lives. Yet how we recognise and adjust to various milestones during our lifespan is tempered by social convention, where ageing has become a disproportionate marker in terms of control and success. How we manage our relationship with our own maturation is crucial to how we sustain a viable place among communities. This weighs hardest on women, as Susan Sontag suggests in “The Double Standard of Aging,” where she charges women to “allow their faces to show the lives they have lived” (1972, 38). If only it were that simple. In response, this paper presents studies of ageing within fiction by Irish women writers, to gauge how far women have really responded to Sontag’s directive.

A land historically marked by the sorrows of astonishingly numerous (in-voluntary) “emigrants” and/or “exiles”, in recent decades Ireland has also undergone remarkably significant waves of immigration and return migration, which have inevitably questioned the nature of “true Irishness” today. Drawing on fictional and non-fictional narratives of metaphorical and/or literal (e)migration produced by the contemporary generation of (non-)Irish women writers, this paper aims to shed light on the personal and national implications related to a woman’s “decision”/“necessity” to seek, leave, and/or return to a “new” home away from home, and therefore to her attempt to “reconcile” with or forge her identity/ies and ambivalent longing and sense of (not) belonging elsewhere or within an ever-changing Ireland.

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925 by Martin Hipsky Anne Cunningham Martin Hipsky. Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. xxi + 316 pp. Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on low modern and popular modernist genres, the work of women romance writers has not received the attention that their past popularity merits. Martin Hipsky’s study attempts to redress the “romance gap” by examining a small group of romances that “best exemplified the meteoric rise of the woman-authored love story in Britain” (xii). In doing so, he provides a detailed evolution of the popular romance genre, and draws some insightful connections to high modernist works. Considering writing by Mansfield, Lawrence, Joyce, West, and Woolf, he examines how these “modernist writers incorporated elements of the romance mode and a related neo-Romanticism into their innovative fiction” (xvi). Indeed, one organizing principle of his study is drawn from Gillian Beer’s The Romance (1970), that “all fiction contains two primary impulses: the impulse to imitate daily life, and the impulse to transcend it” (xi). Throughout the study Hipsky returns to an important link between an emergent modernism and the popular romance, which is that both depart from literary realism of the nineteenth century. The romance writers he considers have “followed the same directive as the high modernists: the imperative to loft us, however fleetingly or intermittently, into a refashioned symbolic order that would bridge us across the pain of the historical Real” (xxi). Hipsky’s first chapter gives an overview of the romance mode and British literary practice, delineating how prior to World War I, almost all popular novels were placed in the not yet gendered category of “romance.” It was not until the third decade of the twentieth century that the romance as a narrative mode was considered a feminine genre. Previously, popular romances did not bear the ideological stigma of the “feminized ‘other’ discourse” (2). While he [End Page 855] notes that feminist criticism and gender studies may offer the most useful framework regarding theories of genre and mode, he nonetheless is “not presuming to offer a bid for the canonization of the neglected women writers or to describe the historical reading experience of the female audience” (2). Rather, his concern is to map how what we refer to today as the “women’s romance” took shape out of shifts in the literary field that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although beyond the avowed scope of the study, an analysis grounded in gender studies and feminist theory would have benefitted his theoretical framework. Using Bourdieu’s theory of literary production and reception, Hipsky’s second chapter charts developments in categories of popular fiction penned by women through the career of romance writer Mary Ward. By 1880 there were two ready-made roles for female fiction writers: the “serious lady novelists” such as Austen, Brontë, and George Eliot, and the “silly lady novelists,” a term coined by Eliot herself for female writers of melodramatic popular novels (21). Mary Ward innovated these two disparate positions over the course of her career. After establishing herself as a “serious lady novelist,” she employed aggressive marketing tactics and achieved unprecedented sales figures and transatlantic success. Ward seemingly transformed herself into a “money-generating fiction machine” and all traces of intellectual ambition and resistance to generic codification had drained from her work by 1908 (43). Subsequently, the most successful female fiction writers in Edwardian England soon abandoned the “serious lady novelist” model altogether. Ward’s trend to write strictly for mass audience appeal had derisive effects on the cultural capital of women’s fiction. It took the emergence of high modernist female writers such as Woolf, West, Mansfield, Richardson, and others to redeem the “symbolic capital of the female literary writer as a social construct” (61); however, this came at a price of increasing the polarization of the literary field. By 1920 intellectually ambitious writers distanced themselves as much as possible from writers who catered to large-scale literary production. Hipsky’s compelling point in this chapter—that modernist women writers defined themselves “as Ward’s...

A collection of contemporary Irish women's writing which reflects the explosion of Irish women's writing in the last 30 years. It includes the work of Julia O'Faolain, Edna O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Binchey, Anne McKay, Fiona Barr, Mary Lavin, Clare Boylan, Anne Devlin and others.