Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women's Writing: Uneasy Moderns

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers - Dorothy Macardle, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane - this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

Author: Naoise Murphy
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 12/31/2025
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9781399547468