Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916–2018
- Discusses texts by James Joyce, John McGahern, Hannah Lynch, Kate O’Brien, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Dervla Murphy, Clare Boylan, Nuala O’Faolain, Eavan Boland, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Éilís ní Dhuibhne, Melatu Uche Okorie, and Soula Emmanuel
- Examines the form, narration, and content of fictional, non-fictional, and national narratives
- Develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology
- Synthesizes historical, sociojuridical, feminist, post-colonial, and literary historical narratives of Irish development
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.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Joyce’s 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 O’Faolain and the Irish Female Artist Child
5. Against Generation in the Place of the Mother: Fictions of Irish Female Antidevelopment, 1990–2018
Coda: The Future of Irish Female Development
Bibliography
Index
Dougherty’s 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.
