Irishness in North American Women's Writing

This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

It advances the field of Irish Diaspora Studies It develops new readings of six North American women writers within Irish-American and Irish-Canadian contexts It contributes to the emerging field of Irish Transatlantic Studies

Autorentext

Ellen McWilliams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009) and Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (2013) and has received a number of awards for research, including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholar Award.

Inhalt

1. Transatlantic Affinities: Irishness in North American Women's Writing.- 2. Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy.- 3.Irish-American Immigrant Histories and Readings of Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan.- 4. 'A Genetic Trait': Alice McDermott's Irish America.- 5. The Lonely Voice: Alice Munro and Ireland.- 6. Irish-Canadian Connections: Jane Urquhart's Historical Fictions.- 7. Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue.