A History of Irish Women's Poetry

Ailbhe Darcy, David Wheatley

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781108478700
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108806763
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms – mythology, gender, history, the nation – and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction I: Why Foremothers?
• Introduction II: The Reception of Irish Women Poets
• Chapter 1 Women in the Medieval Poetry Business
• Chapter 2 Seventeenth-Century Women's Poetry in Ireland
• Chapter 3 The Oral Tradition
• Chapter 4 Archipelagic Ireland: Women's Anglophone Poetry from the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter 5 Irish Romanticism
• Chapter 6 Mary Tighe in Life, Myth, and Literary Vicissitude
• Chapter 7 Masculinity, Nationhood, and the Irish Woman Poet, 1860-1922
• Chapter 8 The Eclipse of Dora Sigerson
• Chapter 9 Between Revivalist Lyric and Irish Modernism
• Chapter 10 The Other 'Northern Renaissance'
• Chapter 11 Rematriating Mid-Century Modernism: Carla Lanyon Lanyon
• Chapter 12 Accidental Irishness and the Transnational Legacy of Lola Ridge
• Chapter 13 Crisis and Renewal: Irish-Language Poetry in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
• Chapter 14 The Poetry of Máire Mhac an tSaoi and the Indivisibility of Love
• Chapter 15 Biddy Jenkinson: Voices from Limbo
• Chapter 16 Bilingual Poetry
• Chapter 17 Catholicism in Modern Irish Women's Poetry
• Chapter 18 1970s-80s Feminism
• Chapter 19 The Art of Fabrication: Reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
• Chapter 20 Eavan Boland, History and Silence
• Chapter 21 Paula Meehan and the Public Poem
• Chapter 22 Formalism and Contemporary Women's Poetry
• Chapter 23 'A Song Said Otherwise': Susan Howe, Maggie O'Sullivan, Catherine Walsh
• Chapter 24 Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry, beyond the Now
• Select Bibliography
• Index