Elke Dhoker Livres

This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overalldevelopment of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form. 

Often hailed as a 'national genre', the short story has a long tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. This volume explores the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.

After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of Irish literature, this collection proposes a reappraisal of Irish women's writing by inviting dialogues with new or hitherto marginalised critical frameworks as well as with foreign and transnational literary traditions. Several essays explore how Irish women writers engaged with European themes and traditions through the genres of travel writing, the historical novel, the monologue and the fairy tale. Other contributions are concerned with the British context in which some texts were published and argue for the existence of Irish inflections of phenomena such as the New Woman, suffragism or vegetarianism. Further chapters emphasise the transnational character of Irish women's writing by applying continental theory and French feminist thinking to various texts; in other chapters new developments in theory are applied to Irish texts for the first time. Casting the efforts of Irish women in a new light, the collection also includes explorations of the work of neglected or emerging authors who have remained comparatively ignored by Irish literary criticism.