Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916–2018

Download or read book Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916–2018 written by Jane Elizabeth Dougherty and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-31 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 studies narratives of Irish female and feminized development, arguing that these postmodern narratives present Irish female maturation as disordered and often deliberately disorderly. The first full-length study of the Irish female coming of age story, the book develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology, derived from the belated oedipalization of Joyce’s bildungsheld, to read these stories. This study argues that all Irish maturation stories are shaped by the uneven and belated maturation story of the Irish republic itself, which took as its avatar the Irish woman, whose citizenship in that republic was unrealized, as indeed was her citizenship in an Irish republic of letters. Dougherty takes the writing of Irish women as seriously as other critics have taken Joyce’s work.