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Edna O’Brien: writing sex and nation

Emer Nolan

in Five Irish Women: The Second Republic, 1960-2016

The chapter considers the history of women in independent Ireland, up to the period of the emergence of Edna O’Brien in the early 1960s. It explores the representation of women in modern Irish ... More

The chapter considers the history of women in independent Ireland, up to the period of the emergence of Edna O’Brien in the early 1960s. It explores the representation of women in modern Irish literature since the time of W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, outlining the rejection of the Revival in the work of James Joyce and other writers. It analyses Edna O’Brien’s creative response to these romantic (Yeatsian) and modernist (Joycean) traditions of Irish literature and pays detailed attention to O’Brien’s description of girlhood, romance, female sexuality, colonialism and violence. O’Brien is discussed in relation to the key works The country girls trilogy; her two volumes of memoir, Mother Ireland and The country girl; and some of her recent fiction.Less

Arrested development: sexuality, trauma and history in Edna O'Brien and John McGahern

Michael G. Cronin

in Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland

This chapter focuses on the works of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy (1960–64) and McGahern's The Dark (1965) were banned due to their portrayal of sexuality. The ... More

This chapter focuses on the works of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy (1960–64) and McGahern's The Dark (1965) were banned due to their portrayal of sexuality. The chapter also discusses the reform of literary censorship and the contribution of these novels to the cultural reconfiguration of sexuality and social change in Ireland.Less

Escape and its Discontents

in London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity

This chapter examines two early novels by Edna O'Brien: Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) and Casualties of Peace (1966). It argues that the experiences of O'Brien's migrant protagonists can be ... More

This chapter examines two early novels by Edna O'Brien: Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) and Casualties of Peace (1966). It argues that the experiences of O'Brien's migrant protagonists can be read as thought experiments on the part of their author and, by implication, a means by which she refigures her own identity from a combination of memory and imagination. Migration also plays an important structural role in her work by framing and accommodating the subtle shifts in cultural perspective and consciousness that take place in her protagonists' lives.Less

Sense and Censorship: Tuairim and Cultural Conservatism

in Tuairim, intellectual debate and policy formulation: Rethinking Ireland, 1954–75

Chapter 5 is concerned with censorship. This chapter examines Tuairim's support for authors who had books banned and the interaction between Fr Peter Connolly, a representative of the liberal wing of ... More

Chapter 5 is concerned with censorship. This chapter examines Tuairim's support for authors who had books banned and the interaction between Fr Peter Connolly, a representative of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, and the society in its quest for reform of the system of censorship in operation in Ireland. Where moving the public towards an appreciation of the literary merits of novels remained incomplete, the society's success in tackling controversial issues and attracting well-known individuals, such as Edna O'Brien, was significant in creating a climate of opinion where reforms could be introduced. The new laws implemented in 1967 successfully ended Tuairim and Connolly's attempts to influence debate on this matter and facilitated the creation of a more open society.Less

‘The Secret Dotted Line’: Return, Roots Journeys and Irish Literary Genealogies

Sinéad Moynihan

in Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The "Returned Yank" in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this ... More

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this chapter discusses narratives in which a thematic preoccupation with return also underwrites metafictional concerns with literary forebears, the Irish literary tradition and artistic exile. Exploring texts that span 1960 to 2008 and the work of prolific, exiled writers Brian Moore (1921-1999) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) as well as the much younger writer Denis Kehoe (b. 1978), this chapter configures ‘return’ in multiple senses: the literal returns of fictional characters to Ireland; return as ‘restoration’ (of occluded histories; of banned books); and return as an opportunity to engage with (literary) genealogies that do not conform to the gendered and heteronormative orthodoxies of the Irish literary tradition.Less

Bird Girls: Modernism and Sexual Ethics in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Paige Reynolds

in Modernism and Close Reading

This chapter examines the gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the aftermath of high modernism. Turning to Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), ... More

This chapter examines the gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the aftermath of high modernism. Turning to Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the chapter argues that these works stage an epiphany that signals a perceived rite of passage promising to move the protagonist into some new form of understanding and experience—though importantly, these epiphanies and what unfolds in their wake are not necessarily characterized strictly by good feeling for female protagonists. Taking the ethics of close reading trauma as its central case in point, the chapter argues that slowly reading difficult texts like McBride’s trains readers to sit patiently not only with the discomfort generated by the intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation but also with the suffering generated by human failing.Less

Women, fictional messages and a crucial decade

Mary Pierse

in From prosperity to austerity: A socio-cultural critique of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath

Pierse looks at the role of women writers who furnish important images of societal change and paint portraits that are vital for social history. Despite the marked lack of public clamour for artistic ... More

Pierse looks at the role of women writers who furnish important images of societal change and paint portraits that are vital for social history. Despite the marked lack of public clamour for artistic involvement in cogitation, diagnosis or prescription regarding two decades of rollercoaster ride from embryonic prosperity to economic austerity, the recent fiction by notable Irish women novelists has determinedly featured numerous depictions of women's experiences, actions and reactions during that time. Such fictional engagement evidences authorial concern with the shifting sands, and a sensitivity to readers’ preoccupations; with no area of life neglected, the novels and short stories furnish important images of societal change and paint portraits that are vital for social history. Perceived constraints, relationship difficulties, negotiation of economic, religious, educational and social environment, attitudes to family and children – all feature in fiction written in this millennium by Anne Enright, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Edna O'Brien, Belinda McKeon, Cláir Ní Aonghusa and others. This paper will consider the authors’ rendering of remarkable developments, elements of resistance, expression of doubt, and divergent attitudes to the fictional delineation of future prospects for women and humanity. As an exploration of gendered narrative enunciations of this period, this chapter offers some original insights.Less

‘Many and terrible are the roads to home’: representations of the immigrant in the contemporary Irish short story

Anne Fogarty

in Literary visions of multicultural Ireland: The immigrant in contemporary Irish literature

This chapter explores reconfigurations of traditional national identities in the short fiction of Edna O’ Brien, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mary O'Donnell, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. ... More

This chapter explores reconfigurations of traditional national identities in the short fiction of Edna O’ Brien, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mary O'Donnell, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's observations about selfhood and Otherness, the author demonstrates that these writers frequently use the figure of the immigrant in order to scrutinise, in the postnational context of Ireland, the shattering of conventional notions about self, family, and community. As the author shows, the immigrant never appears as an isolated motif in fictional portrayals of contemporary Ireland. Rather, the description of such a character tends to be linked with incisive explorations of contemporary Irishness.Less

Introduction

Emer Nolan

in Five Irish women: The second republic, 1960–2016

The introduction outlines the rationale for selecting these five women: Edna O’Brien, Sinéad O’Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O’Faolain and Anne Enright. It discusses the ways in which women in ... More

The introduction outlines the rationale for selecting these five women: Edna O’Brien, Sinéad O’Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O’Faolain and Anne Enright. It discusses the ways in which women in Ireland have been understood as both symbols of the nation and key agents of modernisation. It explores the question of whether Ireland has been exceptionally oppressive to women. It considers current conditions for women in Ireland and argues for the significance of the contribution made to Irish feminism by innovative individuals such as the subjects of this book.Less

‘Mother Macree ad nauseam’: Maternity, Modernity and the Female Returned Yank

Sinéad Moynihan

in Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The "Returned Yank" in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present

This chapter argues that narratives of female Returned Yanks emerge forcefully in Irish culture of the 1990s as a kind of imaginative counterpart to Irish citizens’ enforced confrontation with ... More

This chapter argues that narratives of female Returned Yanks emerge forcefully in Irish culture of the 1990s as a kind of imaginative counterpart to Irish citizens’ enforced confrontation with Ireland’s past at the same historical moment, particularly with respect to the collusion of Church and State in the oppression and, often, abuse of women and children. The protagonists of these texts – and I focus most attentively on works by Benjamin Black (John Banville) and Annie Murphy – literally return to Ireland, but they also visit, or revisit, upon Ireland some of the repressions of its past. They do so both thematically, by dramatising the issues of unmarried motherhood, forced adoption and Church intervention in the family; and formally, by revising previous and tenacious gendered mythologies of emigration and return.Less

Childhood memories

Nicholas Grene

in Farming in Modern Irish Literature

Farming childhoods may be recalled, as in John Montague’s poems as a first formative world, or a historically foundational landscape in Polly Devlin’s memoir. Maura Laverty remembered an (imagined) ... More

Farming childhoods may be recalled, as in John Montague’s poems as a first formative world, or a historically foundational landscape in Polly Devlin’s memoir. Maura Laverty remembered an (imagined) childhood on a farm with her beloved grandmother, while Alice Taylor’s popular Through the Fields to School makes an idyll of her recollections. But equally there are traumatic memories of farmhood violence in the poetry of Jane Clarke or of sexual abuse in the family home, as in Claire Keegan’s short story ‘The Parting Gift’. The childhood farm milieu can also be a place of estrangement in Keegan’s novella Foster, and of alienation in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls.Less

Erin’s Acres: The Returned Yank, Property Disputes and the Rise and Fall of the Irish Economy

Sinéad Moynihan

in Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The "Returned Yank" in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present

This chapter considers the extent to which the Returned Yank surfaces in narratives treating of land acquisition, distribution, ownership and development in Ireland in the second half of the ... More

This chapter considers the extent to which the Returned Yank surfaces in narratives treating of land acquisition, distribution, ownership and development in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. It identifies two overlapping motifs in Returned Yank narratives that have been stated, restated and reworked in various historically-contingent ways from at least the 1930s, through the Lemassian turn, through the Celtic Tiger years: first, the extent to which the Returned Yank who returns to Ireland to buy property symbolises widespread ambivalence concerning the role of the post-independence Land Commission in Irish life; second, the degree to which narratives of land-purchasing (or ‘land-grabbing’) Returned Yanks become abstracted in the 1960s and beyond to the extent that s/he (usually he) comes to symbolise U.S. investment in Ireland more generally.Less