1st Edition

Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020

Edited By Deirdre Flynn, Ciara L. Murphy Copyright 2022
266 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

266 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

266 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980–2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women’s writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women’s writing during critical... Read more

Chapter One: Irish Women’s Writing and Culture Under the Shadow of Austerity

Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy

Section One: Austerity, Feminism, and Conflict

Chapter Two: Two Opposing Narratives? The Field Day and LIP Pamphlets

Laura Loftus

Chapter Three: Austerity, Conflict, and Second-Wave Feminism in the North of Ireland

Ciara L. Murphy

Chapter Four: #WakeUpIrishPoetry: Austerity and Activism in Contemporary Irish Poetry – A Personal Reflection

Kathy D’Arcy

Section Two: Arts and Austerity

Chapter Five: Kermit, Cows, and Headless Chickens: Women’s Comedy Monologues after the Tiger

Clare Keogh

Chapter Six: Balancing Acts: From Survival to Sustainability in Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance

Miriam Haughton and Maria Tivnan

Section Three: Race and Austerity

Chapter Seven: Intersectionality in Contemporary Melodrama: Normal People (McDonald/Abrahamson, 2020) and Kissing Candice (McArdle, 2018)

Zélie Asava

Chapter Eight: Austerity and the Precarity of Whiteness: Polish Characters in Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015) and Rosemary Jenkinson’s Here Comes the Night (2016)

Justine Nakase

Chapter Nine: Black Irish Culture

Sandrine Uwase Ndahiro

Section Four: Spaces of Austerity

Chapter Ten: Austerity, Irish Literary Tropes, and Claire Keegan’s Fiction

Yen-Chi Wu

Chapter Eleven: Celtic Tiger Saga Fiction: Patricia Scanlan’s City Girls and Marian Keyes’ Walsh Family

Margaret O’Neill

Chapter Twelve: ‘Just the way it is’: Portraits of Austerity in Short Fiction by Women from the North of Ireland

Orlaith Darling

Chapter Thirteen: Motherhood, Referendums and Austerity in contemporary Irish Women’s Writing

Deirdre Flynn

Biography

Deirdre Flynn is a lecturer in 21st-century literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She has published widely on contemporary literature, Irish studies, dystopian literature, Haruki Murakami, and literary urban studies. She is co-editor of two collections on Irish literature – Irish Urban Fictions (2018) and Representations of Loss in Irish Literature (2018). She is a member of the Association for Literary Urban Studies and the blog editor for the Irish Women’s Writing Network.

Ciara L. Murphy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Moore Institute and School of English and Creative Arts at NUI Galway. Her forthcoming monograph Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland: From Republic to Pandemic will be published by Routledge. She has published widely on contemporary theatre and performance, Irish studies, commemoration, and feminism. She is currently the co-convenor of the Performance in Public Spaces working group at the International Federation of Theatre Research and is the communications officer for the Irish Society for Theatre Research.

"The results of this collection are urgent, polished, and cohesive..."

-- Tara Stubbs, Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, Kellogg College