Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction
The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:9th Jan '25
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Scheible examines how modern and contemporary Irish fiction often employs the Irish domestic interior and representations of the female body as Mother Ireland to emphasize the biopolitical relationship between Irish femininity, female sexuality, and the nation.
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.
In Body Politics, Scheible does significant, meaningful, and successful work tracing and illuminating what is at stake in Ireland’s persistent metaphor of gender, nation, and religion. * Estudios Irlandeses *
Undeniably an important book, one moreover that never claims to be exhaustive. The strength of Scheible’s study lies in the skill and depth of its readings and the clarity with which it shows how the literary text has become a space for working through the contradictions of a cultural inheritance that binds the bodies of Irish women to the nation’s fate. * Irish University Review *
This is a timely and valuable book. The texts under discussion are well-chosen, the prose is admirably lucid and the analysis is illuminating. -- Ailbhe Darcy, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Cardiff University, UK
Overall, this is a useful volume that adds to the critical conversation about female and national identity in Irish fiction by engaging with contemporary literary and commercial texts that have so far gotten comparatively little critical attention * CHOICE *
[This] rigorous and compelling work stands as a valuable contribution both to Irish scholarship and feminist literary criticism. Equally significant is its engagement with contemporary debates in migration and transnational studies, as it responds to the urgent need for new, plural, and non-restrictive notions of home, selfhood, and cultural identity. * Studia Philologia *
ISBN: 9781350429109
Dimensions: 236mm x 162mm x 16mm
Weight: 453g
192 pages