Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 studies narratives of Irish female and feminized development, arguing that these postmodern narratives present Irish female maturation as disordered and often deliberately disorderly. The first full-length study of the Irish female coming of age story, the book develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology, derived from the belated oedipalization of Joyce’s bildungsheld, to read these stories. This study argues that all Irish maturation stories are shaped by the uneven and belated maturation story of the Irish republic itself, which took as its avatar the Irish woman, whose citizenship in that republic was unrealized, as indeed was her citizenship in an Irish republic of letters. Dougherty takes the writing of Irish women as seriously as other critics have taken Joyce’s work.
Offers the first full-length study of Irish female developmental narratives
Arvustused
Doughertys study represents a radical departure in Irish studies. Drawing on social history, psychoanalytic theory and feminist narratology, Dougherty traces a peripheral genealogy of super-charged female and feminized literary voices exposing, critiquing and resisting the brutalist architectonics of a masculinist, theocratic Irish state across its disastrous rise, and ignominious fall. -- Margot Gayle Backus, University of Houston
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Joyces Sisters
1. Mother and Child Schemes: Stories of Development in the Irish Republic
2. "The radical moment just before birth": Irish Women Writers Remember
Growing Up in Revolutionary Ireland
3. Growing Up in a Living Tomb: Coming of Age in the Irish Latency Period
4. "That mute backward-reaching distance": Eavan Boland, Nuala OFaolain and
the Irish Female Artist Child
5. Against Generation in the Place of the Mother: Fictions of Irish Female
Antidevelopment, 19902018
Coda: The Future of Irish Female Development
Bibliography
Index
Jane Elizabeth Dougherty is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Writing and Digital Humanities and affiliate faculty in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
