1st Edition
Working-Class Women in Irish Literature and Theatre Emerging from the Silence
Introduction: Working-Class Women in Irish Culture
CLARA MALLON AND SALOMÉ PAUL
Section One: Absent Presence: Working-Class Women in the Canon
1 “Not in Flesh”: The Construction and Deconstruction of “Poor Woman” in Irish Theatre
SALOMÉ PAUL
2 Working-Class Actresses and Working-Class Roles: Ireland in the 1910s and 1950s
CATHY LEENEY
3 The “Juno Complex”: Tracing Representations of Working-Class Women in Contemporary Dublin Theatre
FIONA CHARLETON
Section Two: Class, Convergence, and Consciousness on the Contemporary Stage
4 Theatre of Grace Dyas: Classed Re-Imaginings of Social and Cultural Histories
CLARA MALLON AND SALOMÉ PAUL
5 “Who Are You Angry With?”: Class, Race, and Conflict in the Plays of Rosaleen McDonagh
JUSTINE NAKASE
6 Hope in the Face of Despair: (Re)Presenting Working-Class Women in Natural History of Hope
CLARA MALLON
7 The Bearable, Bridgeable, and the Imaginable: Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters
EAMONN JORDAN
8 “Wakened” Solidarity: Making the Invisible Visible for Working-Class Women in Frank McGuinness’s The Factory Girls
DAVID CREGAN
Section Three: Fractured Existences: Women on the Periphery in Theatre in the North of Ireland
9 Women’s Work: Challenging Social Dysfunction Through Working-Class Women’s Performance Practice in the North of Ireland
CIARA L. MURPHY
10 Confinement, Resistance and Reclaiming Space in JustUs’s Just a Prisoner’s Wife
MICHAEL PIERSE
Section four: Breaking Silence: In Conversation with Working-Class Artists
11 In Conversation with Veronica Dyas
12 In Conversation with Louise Lowe
13 In Conversation with Felipeaks
14 In Conversation with Emmet Kirwan
Biography
Clara Mallon recently completed her PhD thesis at the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, University of Galway. Her project was funded by the Irish Research Council’s Postgraduate Scholarship and centres on the representation of the working class in Irish theatre and performance in Ireland. She has published with the Irish University Review, and has a number of chapters in edited collections. She occasionally lectures at University College Dublin.
Salomé Paul is a Teaching Fellow in Drama Studies at University College Dublin (UCD). She completed a cotutelle PhD from Sorbonne University and UCD in 2020. She was awarded the French Government Medal and the National University of Ireland Prize for Distinction in Collaborative Degrees for her doctoral research in 2021. She was the recipient of the Two-Year Postdoctoral Scheme of the Irish Research Council from 2020 to 2022, which led to the publication of her monograph Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy: Feminist Myths of Monstrosity in 2024.
