Elke D'hoker | KU Leuven (original) (raw)
Papers by Elke D'hoker
Honest Ulsterman
Over the last few decades, literary scholars have come to recognize the seminal importance of lit... more Over the last few decades, literary scholars have come to recognize the seminal importance of literary magazines for the study of literary traditions as well as the history of ideologies and ideas. This "rise of periodical studies" [1] has been Feature (features) Colin Dardis Colin Dardis interviews Geraldine O'Kane.
Irish University Review 51.1, 2021
literary magazine, then edited by Séan O'Faoláin. While her essay 'The Big House' in The Bell's o... more literary magazine, then edited by Séan O'Faoláin. While her essay 'The Big House' in The Bell's opening issue is perhaps best known, the magazine also published a short story, a review, two pieces of memoir, two obituaries, and a few other, smaller pieces by Bowen during the war years. At the same time, Bowen and her work featured in several reviews, in an interview as well as in O'Faoláin's editorials and critical essays. In short, Bowen was a fairly prominent presence in The Bell during the first years of its existence. Yet, as a Protestant, Anglo-Irish woman writer living in England, Bowen was also in many ways an odd presence in The Bell. Launched during the first months of the Emergency, The Bell was very much an Irish magazine, addressed to Irish readers and 'organized to open up a market for Irish writers at a very difficult period', as O'Faoláin put it. 1 Even though The Bell sought to present an inclusive, cosmopolitan take on Ireland and Irish identity, the majority of its contributors belonged to the Catholic middle classes. As Conor Cruise O'Brien stated somewhat provocatively in 1946: 'In its caution, its realism, its profound but ambivalent nationalism, its seizures of stodginess and its bad paper, it reflects the class who write it and read itteachers, librarians, junior civil servants, the lettered section of the Irish petty bourgeoisie'. 2 Together with Hubert Butler and Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen was one of the few Ascendancy writers to appear with some regularity in The Bell. Moreover, because of its focus on Irish writers and Irish life, the magazine rarely published work by writers living outside of Ireland, as Bowen had been since her childhood. As a woman writer too, Bowen belonged to a small minority in The Bell. Only one in ten of the stories published by O'Faoláin were by women writers, a situation that improved only marginally when Peadar O'Donnell took over as main editor: O'Faoláin published 11 stories by women writers on a total of 109 stories; O'Donnell published 19 stories by
One of the important functions of literary periodicals is to foster the emergence of new talent a... more One of the important functions of literary periodicals is to foster the emergence of new talent and to offer aspiring writers the exposure and encouragement to launch a literary career. As feminist scholarship has shown, however, this has not always been the case for women writers. In recent studies, Anne Mulhall, Anne Fogarty and Lucy Collins have demonstrated that Irish magazines frequently obstructed rather than fostered the entrance of women poets to the literary scene in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. 1 Periodical culture was dominated by male writers and editors, who monopolized aesthetic debates and generally had no eye for the creative or critical contributions of women writers. The Bell, edited by Seán O'Faoláin and Peadar O'Donnell between 1940 and 1954, has been singled out as a notorious example of such androcentric bias, as the magazine published only three female poets in its nearly fourteen-year run. 2 Instead, Fogarty notes in mitigation, The Bell 'devoted its energies […] to spearheading the work of female fiction writers'. 3 While it is true that The Bell was predominantly prose-based and favoured short fiction as its literary lodestone, it did not publish many female prose writers either. The vast majority of issues-4 out of 5carried no literary fiction by women whatsoever: prominent women writers such as Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien, and Una Troy rarely appeared in its pages, while many others, including Norah Hoult, Maeve Brennan, and Molly Keane were entirely absent. Far from compensating for the absence of female poets, therefore, the scarcity of female novelists and short story writers appears to have reinforced the general marginalization of women writers in The Bell. Although the past decade has seen a growth of scholarship on The Bell, which has confirmed the magazine's position as one of the most influential literary publications in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, little attention has been paid thus far to the way in which the magazine's role as gatekeeper and bestower of literary value impacted the careers and ambitions of writing women. 4 Instead, the magazine has been studied for its take
Quelle est la relation entre le genre bref et l'expérimental? Un texte narratif invite-t-il davan... more Quelle est la relation entre le genre bref et l'expérimental? Un texte narratif invite-t-il davantage à l'expérimentation de par sa brièveté? En outre, serait-il possible de déceler certains liens particuliers entre le récit bref et l'expérimental dans la littérature du XX e siècle et la littérature contemporaine ? L'introduction à ce numéro d'ILLI aborde ces questions en examinant les caractéristiques formelles et stylistiques des récits brefs (condensation, fragmentation et ellipse) et en étudiant leurs contextes de publication en termes de polytextualité, d'intermédialité et d'hybridité. Pour ce faire, nous faisant appel à des approches théoriques de la brièveté dans les récits en prose plus en particulier, ainsi qu'à des exemples concrets tirés des articles réunis dans ce numéro spécial.
Short fiction in theory and practice, 2020
The article discusses short stories by contemporary Irish, British and American women writers tha... more The article discusses short stories by contemporary Irish, British and American women writers that foreground animals and nature in particular ways. The stories invite us to reconsider our relation to non-human animals and our natural environment. In doing so, these writers reinvent the tradition of animal stories for our current context of global warming.
In 2016, New Island Books published The Glass Shore, an anthology of short stories by women write... more In 2016, New Island Books published The Glass Shore, an anthology of short stories by women writers from the North of Ireland, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. To stage and share examples of the ‘reading dynamics’ enabled by this welcome anthology, I invited seven contributors to choose and respond to a featured writer or writers. Contributors engage with the selected stories intensively by way of theme, subject matter, and form, and extensively not only across their chosen author's wider career but also with respect to the cultural impact of her writing. Respondents are: Sheila McWade, George Legg, Eamonn Hughes, Lia Mills, Caroline Magennis, Caroline Heafey, and Elke D'hoker.
Narrating Ireland in Different Genres and Media
published in a special issue on community in British fiction of Anglistik 26,1, pp. 13-24.
Studies in Canadian Literature 32,1, 2008
Carol Shields's short fiction eschews the teleological model of plot development, and instead dev... more Carol Shields's short fiction eschews the teleological model of plot development, and instead develops coherence through associations, thematic development, and epiphanies — what Virginia Woolf calls "moments of being." Shields departs from modernist short fiction by transforming the literary moment so that it becomes a part of both the experimental structure and world view of her stories. In so doing, she departs from the modern Joycean epiphanic tradition, as expounded by theorists such as Morris Beja, Ashton Nichols and Robert Langbaum. Unlike epiphanies in the Joycean tradition, Shields's foreground experience over insight, and they emphasize the embeddedness of the epiphany in the domestic, in keeping with what Martin Hiedegger calls "residency."
Orbis Litterarum 67,4, 2012
This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction o... more This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. First, the essay analyses the construction of these images in terms of style, arguing that Bowen’s idiosyncratic combination of a variety of figural tropes and narrative strategies results in a strong but highly ambivalent bond between house and character, whereby houses at once illuminate and efface their inhabitants. Second, while most critics have interpreted Bowen’s houses in the context of her Anglo-Irish background as emblems of a lost tradition and identity, this essay argues that Bowen’s houses also evoke other contexts, in particular the celebration of the domestic in interwar Britain. Through a detailed reading of several short stories, it shows how Bowen both satirises this idealisation of the home and uncovers its far more awful reality, especially for the ‘daughters’ and ‘ladies’ of the house. A final part considers the isolation that marks nearly all of Bowen’s houses and opposes it to her characterisation of the ideal house as a place of hospitality and recognition.
Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2, 2012
Women's Writing, 2011
This article argues that several of Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894... more This article argues that several of Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) offer a sustained and intelligent response to Nietzsche's philosophy, and in particular to his take on women. While earlier critics have taken note of Egerton's three explicit references to Nietzsche, as well as of her general affinity with his philosophy, the precise extent of her engagement with Nietzsche's thought has not yet been investigated. Through a close reading of Egerton's short stories, in particular “The Regeneration of Two”, the article aims to show that while Egerton took over some aspects of Nietzsche's critique, she also sought to defend women and, most importantly, tried to construct an alternative feminine ideal which owed a lot to Nietzsche's Übermensch. Interestingly, Nietzsche's influence is not just evident in the general characteristics of Egerton's feminine ideal—self-reliance, independence, strength, a closeness to body and nature—but also in the tensions that haunt this ideal—the tension between masculine and feminine characteristics, as well as the tension between individualism and love or between independence and motherhood.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 2,1-2, 2013
This paper traces the development figures of the author in the short fiction of the Irish writer ... more This paper traces the development figures of the author in the short fiction of the Irish writer Mary Lavin against the background of her anomalous position as woman, writer and mother in the conservative and patriarchal context of mid-century Ireland. Through a detailed reading of six stories, the paper shows how after staging a confident author figure in the early "A Story With A Pattern", Lavin dramatized the tension between her roles as mother and artist in a series of oppositional characters in stories such as "The Becker Wives", "Eterna" and "In a Café". Her artist figures, modelled after the Romantic conception of the author as exceptionally gifted outsiders, are thus unable to attain 'ordinary' lives as wives or mothers; while her alter ego in the so-called widow stories are mostly realised as 'just' wife, widow and mother. Only in two stories written at the end of her career does Lavin again stage an author figure who combines the roles of mother and writer, thus offering an alternative to the Romantic and predominantly masculine image of the author that has long dominated Irish literary culture.
This essay considers the thematic repercussions of the peculiar narrative and generic structure o... more This essay considers the thematic repercussions of the peculiar narrative and generic structure of The Lucky Ones as a collection of linked short stories. The form of the short story cycle allows Cusk to stage a variety of perspectives on parenthood and family life within one book. Moreover, the tension between unity and fragmentation, which is characteristic of the form, serves to highlight the tension between individualism and connection or community in The Lucky Ones. Even though the protagonists remain bound within their own lives, families and stories they can be seen to yearn for connection and communion in the epiphanic moments that mark the singular stories. In the final part of the paper, I consider Cusk’s representation of contemporary community as a loose network of relations within the context of recent approaches to community in social theory and philosophy.
Because of their evocations of a seemingly timeless rural Ireland with all its familiar cliche´s,... more Because of their evocations of a seemingly timeless rural Ireland with all its familiar cliche´s,
Claire Keegan’s stories have often been compared to those of John McGahern. Through an
analysis of a number of Keegan’s stories, all offering a daughter’s perspective on this rural
Ireland, this essay shows that, unlike John McGahern, Keegan is actually interested in
recording and staging change. This essay first considers these stories in the context of earlier
dramatizations of the mother-daughter plot in fiction by Irish women writers such as Edna
O’Brien, Mary Lavin and Mary Beckett, arguing that the development of Keegan’s daughters
follows a far more positive trajectory and that their relationship with the mother is typically
characterized in terms of ‘‘similarity with a difference’’. Second, this essay analyses Keegan’s
use of the first-person present tense in most of these daughter stories to show that this
peculiar narrative mode further underscores the dimension of change. Finally, the essay offers
a reading of Foster, which brings all of these strands together in a powerful ‘‘long short story’’.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Jan 1, 2006
... way confession can be completed. In terms of genre, this peculiar ideal of revealing the trut... more ... way confession can be completed. In terms of genre, this peculiar ideal of revealing the truth of the self distin-guishes confession from other forms of autobiography, such as apology or mem-oir. Following Francis R. Harte, we ...
Etudes irlandaises, Jan 1, 2007
Honest Ulsterman
Over the last few decades, literary scholars have come to recognize the seminal importance of lit... more Over the last few decades, literary scholars have come to recognize the seminal importance of literary magazines for the study of literary traditions as well as the history of ideologies and ideas. This "rise of periodical studies" [1] has been Feature (features) Colin Dardis Colin Dardis interviews Geraldine O'Kane.
Irish University Review 51.1, 2021
literary magazine, then edited by Séan O'Faoláin. While her essay 'The Big House' in The Bell's o... more literary magazine, then edited by Séan O'Faoláin. While her essay 'The Big House' in The Bell's opening issue is perhaps best known, the magazine also published a short story, a review, two pieces of memoir, two obituaries, and a few other, smaller pieces by Bowen during the war years. At the same time, Bowen and her work featured in several reviews, in an interview as well as in O'Faoláin's editorials and critical essays. In short, Bowen was a fairly prominent presence in The Bell during the first years of its existence. Yet, as a Protestant, Anglo-Irish woman writer living in England, Bowen was also in many ways an odd presence in The Bell. Launched during the first months of the Emergency, The Bell was very much an Irish magazine, addressed to Irish readers and 'organized to open up a market for Irish writers at a very difficult period', as O'Faoláin put it. 1 Even though The Bell sought to present an inclusive, cosmopolitan take on Ireland and Irish identity, the majority of its contributors belonged to the Catholic middle classes. As Conor Cruise O'Brien stated somewhat provocatively in 1946: 'In its caution, its realism, its profound but ambivalent nationalism, its seizures of stodginess and its bad paper, it reflects the class who write it and read itteachers, librarians, junior civil servants, the lettered section of the Irish petty bourgeoisie'. 2 Together with Hubert Butler and Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen was one of the few Ascendancy writers to appear with some regularity in The Bell. Moreover, because of its focus on Irish writers and Irish life, the magazine rarely published work by writers living outside of Ireland, as Bowen had been since her childhood. As a woman writer too, Bowen belonged to a small minority in The Bell. Only one in ten of the stories published by O'Faoláin were by women writers, a situation that improved only marginally when Peadar O'Donnell took over as main editor: O'Faoláin published 11 stories by women writers on a total of 109 stories; O'Donnell published 19 stories by
One of the important functions of literary periodicals is to foster the emergence of new talent a... more One of the important functions of literary periodicals is to foster the emergence of new talent and to offer aspiring writers the exposure and encouragement to launch a literary career. As feminist scholarship has shown, however, this has not always been the case for women writers. In recent studies, Anne Mulhall, Anne Fogarty and Lucy Collins have demonstrated that Irish magazines frequently obstructed rather than fostered the entrance of women poets to the literary scene in mid-twentieth-century Ireland. 1 Periodical culture was dominated by male writers and editors, who monopolized aesthetic debates and generally had no eye for the creative or critical contributions of women writers. The Bell, edited by Seán O'Faoláin and Peadar O'Donnell between 1940 and 1954, has been singled out as a notorious example of such androcentric bias, as the magazine published only three female poets in its nearly fourteen-year run. 2 Instead, Fogarty notes in mitigation, The Bell 'devoted its energies […] to spearheading the work of female fiction writers'. 3 While it is true that The Bell was predominantly prose-based and favoured short fiction as its literary lodestone, it did not publish many female prose writers either. The vast majority of issues-4 out of 5carried no literary fiction by women whatsoever: prominent women writers such as Mary Lavin, Kate O'Brien, and Una Troy rarely appeared in its pages, while many others, including Norah Hoult, Maeve Brennan, and Molly Keane were entirely absent. Far from compensating for the absence of female poets, therefore, the scarcity of female novelists and short story writers appears to have reinforced the general marginalization of women writers in The Bell. Although the past decade has seen a growth of scholarship on The Bell, which has confirmed the magazine's position as one of the most influential literary publications in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, little attention has been paid thus far to the way in which the magazine's role as gatekeeper and bestower of literary value impacted the careers and ambitions of writing women. 4 Instead, the magazine has been studied for its take
Quelle est la relation entre le genre bref et l'expérimental? Un texte narratif invite-t-il davan... more Quelle est la relation entre le genre bref et l'expérimental? Un texte narratif invite-t-il davantage à l'expérimentation de par sa brièveté? En outre, serait-il possible de déceler certains liens particuliers entre le récit bref et l'expérimental dans la littérature du XX e siècle et la littérature contemporaine ? L'introduction à ce numéro d'ILLI aborde ces questions en examinant les caractéristiques formelles et stylistiques des récits brefs (condensation, fragmentation et ellipse) et en étudiant leurs contextes de publication en termes de polytextualité, d'intermédialité et d'hybridité. Pour ce faire, nous faisant appel à des approches théoriques de la brièveté dans les récits en prose plus en particulier, ainsi qu'à des exemples concrets tirés des articles réunis dans ce numéro spécial.
Short fiction in theory and practice, 2020
The article discusses short stories by contemporary Irish, British and American women writers tha... more The article discusses short stories by contemporary Irish, British and American women writers that foreground animals and nature in particular ways. The stories invite us to reconsider our relation to non-human animals and our natural environment. In doing so, these writers reinvent the tradition of animal stories for our current context of global warming.
In 2016, New Island Books published The Glass Shore, an anthology of short stories by women write... more In 2016, New Island Books published The Glass Shore, an anthology of short stories by women writers from the North of Ireland, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. To stage and share examples of the ‘reading dynamics’ enabled by this welcome anthology, I invited seven contributors to choose and respond to a featured writer or writers. Contributors engage with the selected stories intensively by way of theme, subject matter, and form, and extensively not only across their chosen author's wider career but also with respect to the cultural impact of her writing. Respondents are: Sheila McWade, George Legg, Eamonn Hughes, Lia Mills, Caroline Magennis, Caroline Heafey, and Elke D'hoker.
Narrating Ireland in Different Genres and Media
published in a special issue on community in British fiction of Anglistik 26,1, pp. 13-24.
Studies in Canadian Literature 32,1, 2008
Carol Shields's short fiction eschews the teleological model of plot development, and instead dev... more Carol Shields's short fiction eschews the teleological model of plot development, and instead develops coherence through associations, thematic development, and epiphanies — what Virginia Woolf calls "moments of being." Shields departs from modernist short fiction by transforming the literary moment so that it becomes a part of both the experimental structure and world view of her stories. In so doing, she departs from the modern Joycean epiphanic tradition, as expounded by theorists such as Morris Beja, Ashton Nichols and Robert Langbaum. Unlike epiphanies in the Joycean tradition, Shields's foreground experience over insight, and they emphasize the embeddedness of the epiphany in the domestic, in keeping with what Martin Hiedegger calls "residency."
Orbis Litterarum 67,4, 2012
This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction o... more This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. First, the essay analyses the construction of these images in terms of style, arguing that Bowen’s idiosyncratic combination of a variety of figural tropes and narrative strategies results in a strong but highly ambivalent bond between house and character, whereby houses at once illuminate and efface their inhabitants. Second, while most critics have interpreted Bowen’s houses in the context of her Anglo-Irish background as emblems of a lost tradition and identity, this essay argues that Bowen’s houses also evoke other contexts, in particular the celebration of the domestic in interwar Britain. Through a detailed reading of several short stories, it shows how Bowen both satirises this idealisation of the home and uncovers its far more awful reality, especially for the ‘daughters’ and ‘ladies’ of the house. A final part considers the isolation that marks nearly all of Bowen’s houses and opposes it to her characterisation of the ideal house as a place of hospitality and recognition.
Journal of Narrative Theory 42.2, 2012
Women's Writing, 2011
This article argues that several of Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894... more This article argues that several of Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) offer a sustained and intelligent response to Nietzsche's philosophy, and in particular to his take on women. While earlier critics have taken note of Egerton's three explicit references to Nietzsche, as well as of her general affinity with his philosophy, the precise extent of her engagement with Nietzsche's thought has not yet been investigated. Through a close reading of Egerton's short stories, in particular “The Regeneration of Two”, the article aims to show that while Egerton took over some aspects of Nietzsche's critique, she also sought to defend women and, most importantly, tried to construct an alternative feminine ideal which owed a lot to Nietzsche's Übermensch. Interestingly, Nietzsche's influence is not just evident in the general characteristics of Egerton's feminine ideal—self-reliance, independence, strength, a closeness to body and nature—but also in the tensions that haunt this ideal—the tension between masculine and feminine characteristics, as well as the tension between individualism and love or between independence and motherhood.
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 2,1-2, 2013
This paper traces the development figures of the author in the short fiction of the Irish writer ... more This paper traces the development figures of the author in the short fiction of the Irish writer Mary Lavin against the background of her anomalous position as woman, writer and mother in the conservative and patriarchal context of mid-century Ireland. Through a detailed reading of six stories, the paper shows how after staging a confident author figure in the early "A Story With A Pattern", Lavin dramatized the tension between her roles as mother and artist in a series of oppositional characters in stories such as "The Becker Wives", "Eterna" and "In a Café". Her artist figures, modelled after the Romantic conception of the author as exceptionally gifted outsiders, are thus unable to attain 'ordinary' lives as wives or mothers; while her alter ego in the so-called widow stories are mostly realised as 'just' wife, widow and mother. Only in two stories written at the end of her career does Lavin again stage an author figure who combines the roles of mother and writer, thus offering an alternative to the Romantic and predominantly masculine image of the author that has long dominated Irish literary culture.
This essay considers the thematic repercussions of the peculiar narrative and generic structure o... more This essay considers the thematic repercussions of the peculiar narrative and generic structure of The Lucky Ones as a collection of linked short stories. The form of the short story cycle allows Cusk to stage a variety of perspectives on parenthood and family life within one book. Moreover, the tension between unity and fragmentation, which is characteristic of the form, serves to highlight the tension between individualism and connection or community in The Lucky Ones. Even though the protagonists remain bound within their own lives, families and stories they can be seen to yearn for connection and communion in the epiphanic moments that mark the singular stories. In the final part of the paper, I consider Cusk’s representation of contemporary community as a loose network of relations within the context of recent approaches to community in social theory and philosophy.
Because of their evocations of a seemingly timeless rural Ireland with all its familiar cliche´s,... more Because of their evocations of a seemingly timeless rural Ireland with all its familiar cliche´s,
Claire Keegan’s stories have often been compared to those of John McGahern. Through an
analysis of a number of Keegan’s stories, all offering a daughter’s perspective on this rural
Ireland, this essay shows that, unlike John McGahern, Keegan is actually interested in
recording and staging change. This essay first considers these stories in the context of earlier
dramatizations of the mother-daughter plot in fiction by Irish women writers such as Edna
O’Brien, Mary Lavin and Mary Beckett, arguing that the development of Keegan’s daughters
follows a far more positive trajectory and that their relationship with the mother is typically
characterized in terms of ‘‘similarity with a difference’’. Second, this essay analyses Keegan’s
use of the first-person present tense in most of these daughter stories to show that this
peculiar narrative mode further underscores the dimension of change. Finally, the essay offers
a reading of Foster, which brings all of these strands together in a powerful ‘‘long short story’’.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Jan 1, 2006
... way confession can be completed. In terms of genre, this peculiar ideal of revealing the trut... more ... way confession can be completed. In terms of genre, this peculiar ideal of revealing the truth of the self distin-guishes confession from other forms of autobiography, such as apology or mem-oir. Following Francis R. Harte, we ...
Etudes irlandaises, Jan 1, 2007
Often hailed as a ‘national genre’, the short story has a long and distinguished tradition in Ire... more Often hailed as a ‘national genre’, the short story has a long and distinguished tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. Critical appreciation of the Irish short story, however, has laboured for too long under the normative conception of it as a realist form, used to depict quintessential truths about Ireland and Irish identity. This definition fails to do justice to the richness and variety of short stories published in Ireland since the 1850s. This collection aims to open up the critical debate on the Irish short story to the many different concerns, influences and innovations by which it has been formed. The essays gathered here consider the diverse national and international influences on the Irish short story and investigate its genealogy. They recover the short fiction of writers neglected in previous literary histories and highlight unexpected strands in the work of established writers. They scrutinize established traditions and use cutting-edge critical frameworks to discern new trends. Taken together, the essays contribute to a more encompassing and enabling view of the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.
Ever since the publication of her first collection, Tales from Bective Bridge, in 1942, Mary Lavi... more Ever since the publication of her first collection, Tales from Bective Bridge, in 1942, Mary Lavin has been praised for admirably capturing the social and psychological reality of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, in intense and lucid stories.
Yet Lavin’s sharp insight into the quiet tragedies and joys of human life easily transcends its immediate context, and her work continues to appeal to contemporary readers, both in Ireland and abroad.
To celebrate the centenary of Mary Lavin’s birth, this collection honours one of the leading figures of the Irish short story tradition. Leading criticss examine the main themes and stylistic features of Lavin’s novels and short stories from a variety of perspectives, including gender, sexuality, family and community.
Lavin’s work is presented here in its literary, historical and biographical context, drawing attention to Lavin’s indebtedness to modernism, her engagement with popular culture and the influence of her early American experience.
While some writers offer new insights into such famous stories as ‘In a Cafe’ or ‘The Becker Wives’, others bring to light largely neglected gems such as ‘The Yellow Beret’ or ‘The Small Bequest’. There is also engagement with new archival material, including Lavin’s correspondence with her New Yorker editors and private letters
After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of ... more After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of Irish literature, this collection proposes a reappraisal of Irish women’s writing by inviting dialogues with new or hitherto marginalised critical frameworks as well as with foreign and transnational literary traditions. Several essays explore how Irish women writers engaged with European themes and traditions through the genres of travel writing, the historical novel, the monologue and the fairy tale. Other contributions are concerned with the British context in which some texts were published and argue for the existence of Irish inflections of phenomena such as the New Woman, suffragism or vegetarianism. Further chapters emphasise the transnational character of Irish women’s writing by applying continental theory and French feminist thinking to various texts; in other chapters new developments in theory are applied to Irish texts for the first time. Casting the efforts of Irish women in a new light, the collection also includes explorations of the work of neglected or emerging authors who have remained comparatively ignored by Irish literary criticism.
This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twe... more This volume deals with the occurrence and development of unreliable first-person narration in twentieth century Western literature. The different articles in this collection approach this topic both from the angle of literary theory and through a detailed reading of literary texts. By addressing questions concerning the functions, characteristics and types of unreliability, this collection contributes to the current theoretical debate about unreliable narration. At the same time, the collection highlights the different uses to which unreliability has been put in different contexts, poetical traditions and literary movements. It does so by tracing the unreliable first-person narrator in a variety of texts from Dutch, German, American, British, French, Italian, Polish, Danish and Argentinean literature. In this way, this volume significantly extends the traditional ‘canon’ of narrative unreliability. This collection combines essays from some of the foremost theoreticians of unreliability (James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning) with essays from experts in different national traditions. The result is a collection that approaches the ‘case’ of narrative unreliability from a new and more varied perspective.
This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers fr... more This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overall development of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form.
Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original re... more Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville’s solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
European Journal of English Studies, Jan 1, 2010
... Reading Novels, she opposes fiction to drama which has found its own: The drama, however, i... more ... Reading Novels, she opposes fiction to drama which has found its own: The drama, however, is ... with formal purity and perfection, much as writers like Alberto Moravia or Julio Cortazar have more ... be an art of emotion rather than of thought, both in the writing and the reading. ...
English Text Construction, 2012
Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (Irish Studies in Europe; vol. 10) , 2021
published in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, edited by Elke ... more published in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, edited by Elke D'hoker and Gunther Martens (De Gruyter, 2008)
