Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction

The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland

Ellen Scheible

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781350429123
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Body Politics
• 1 Mirroring and the Female Body in James Joyce
• 2 The Danger of the Domestic in Ireland: Bridget Cleary, Big House Modernism, and Tana French
• 3 Reflection, Anxiety, and the Feminized Body: Contemporary Irish Gothic
• 4 Bildung and the Nonreproductive Female Body in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing
• 5 “And There Was One Less Person in the Room”: Popularity, Empathy, and Victimization in Tana French’s The Witch Elm
• 6 Normal People, Then and Now: James Joyce and Sally Rooney
• Coda: Man’s Old Home
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright