Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing

Abstract

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).