20 ‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction

White, Siân

doi:10.1515/9781474456708-024

Cited by 9 publications

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Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

Reynolds

2023

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Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode examines the tangled relationship between Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women’s fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of works being commended for their innovative deployment of tactics drawn from early twentieth-century modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across nearly a century, writers from Kate O’Brien to Sally Rooney have restyled modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of individual consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenacious imperatives of church and state in Ireland and Northern Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, the ordered narrative of the book. Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, and Claire-Louise Bennett are among those who employ the modernist mode to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, gender bias, political violence, and sexual abuse. The lessons offered by modernism in such fiction, as assiduous close readings reveal, are often distressing. The stubborn problems depicted by the stubborn mode are often exhaustive (this problem is everywhere), exhausted (we’ve seen it a million times), and exhausting (and yet it continues).

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Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

Reynolds

2023

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Introduction: Looking

Reynolds

2023

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

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Opening with a close reading of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), this introduction offers a new history of Irish women’s writing, exposing the critical biases that have occluded our understanding of its intricate relationship with literary modernism. It also lays out the conceptual framework for the stubborn mode of modernism. Stubborn modes are tried-and-true literary tactics that trigger a sense of recognition when readers encounter them, a constellation of traits—including style, tone, forms, content, and history—commonly associated with a particular literary movement or school that travels across time. Composed of literary conventions, the stubborn mode of modernism sustains the aesthetic as well as the political impulses associated with the movement’s early history. The stubborn mode in contemporary fiction helps to remind readers of the sweep of history, using literary form and content to underscore certain ongoing cultural problems, as well as to call attention to remedies previously imagined for such stubborn problems, whether the outcomes of those interventions have proven to be successful, unsuccessful, or (more likely, as seen across time) a measure of both.

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Refashioning Modernism

Reynolds

2023

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

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This chapter turns to short fiction by Irish women writers, skipping across decades to examine the ongoing tactical use of the stubborn mode of modernism in representations of female subjectivity. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” (1941), set during Irish neutrality of the Second World War, Maeve Kelly’s “Morning at My Window” (1972) and Evelyn Conlon’s “Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour or And Also, Susan …” (1993), both written in the midst of specific moments of feminist urgency for Irish women, and June Caldwell’s “SOMAT” (2015), published amid the abortion rights debates that preceded the repeal of the Eight Amendment of the Irish Constitution, demonstrate how women writing in the aftermath of high modernism repurpose its experiments, seeking in part to amend the early movement’s masculinist bias. In their representations of neglected aspects of female subjectivity, they engage with modernist heavyweights such as Joyce and Eliot, but they also mine Russian theater and popular romance, among other surprising sources.

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20 ‘Stories Are a Different Kind of True’: Gender and Narrative Agency in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

Introduction: Looking

Refashioning Modernism

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