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This seminar will provide students with an introduction to contemporary Irish women's literature from the 1970s until the present day. During this time, Ireland has witnessed hitherto unimaginable social change. As the editors of the anthology Stories by Contemporary Irish Women wrote in 1990: "Irish women have participated in a cataclysmic political, economic, and social upheaval – a violent civil war in the North, an unsettling European economic alliance, and a traumatic clash of traditionalism and modernism. […] Gone is the nineteenth-century image of a mist-shrouded isle with peasants dancing on the Big House lawns and thatched cabins with hens roosting on open half-doors. The modern writer mire likely inhabits a world of computerized offices, chic boutiques, fashionable lounges and fast cars – it is the world of her fiction. She portrays a society in flux, a society whose very traditions and values are in question." Instead, Irish women writers and poets from Edna O'Brien to Medbh McGuckian have embraced feminist ideas and challenged traditional social and religious norms and values. A selection of critical as well as literary texts (mainly short stories and poems) will be made available via a Moodle course. |
