Austerity and Irish women's writing and culture, 1980-2020 / edited by Deirdre Flynn and Ciara L. Murphy. - Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. - 1 online resource - Routledge Studies in Irish Literature .

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 Beheaded 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: Irish Realism, Affect, and Claire Keegan's Austere Rural Ireland

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



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 junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women's writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women's writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland's consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women's life writing, and women's cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.

9781000588354 9781000588330 1000588335 9781003207474 1003207472 1000588351


Economics and literature--History--Ireland--20th century.
Economics and literature--History--Ireland--21st century.
English literature--Irish authors--History and criticism.
English literature--Women authors--History and criticism.
Irish literature--Women authors--History and criticism.
LITERARY CRITICISM / General
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

820.9/3553