Kirjahaku

What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature?This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied the three most influential French feminists and three important contemporary British women novelists. Treating both fiction and theory as texts, she traces the connections between the theorists – Hélène Cixious, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – and the novelists – Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark.This reading of the work of these six major women writers explores new forms of women’s identity, subjectivity and narrative and demonstrates how theoretical and literary texts can illuminate each other to bridge the gap between theory and literary criticism.

What is the relationship between feminist critical theory and literature?This book deals with the relationship between women and writing, mothers and daughters, the maternal and history. It addresses the questions about language, writing and the relations between women which have preoccupied the three most influential French feminists and three important contemporary British women novelists. Treating both fiction and theory as texts, she traces the connections between the theorists – Hélène Cixious, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – and the novelists – Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark.This reading of the work of these six major women writers explores new forms of women’s identity, subjectivity and narrative and demonstrates how theoretical and literary texts can illuminate each other to bridge the gap between theory and literary criticism.

This book analyzes the roots of Irish social and sexual conservatism and the dramatic change in one of the most basic areas of human experience: how we understand our roles as men and women. It looks at the relationship between sexual and cultural dissent and the long, slow role of culture in generating change. Meaney offers the first major study that sets the relationship between national and gender identities in the context of analysis of Irish identity as white identity, tracing the identification of female sexuality with foreign threat in nationalist discourse and its consequences in contemporary representations of immigrant women and their children. The study presents an extended analysis of the relationship between feminism and nationalism, and between gender and modernism. Analyzing the role of Joyce in contemporary culture and Yeats and Synge in the understanding of tradition, it also sets their work in the context of their less known female contemporaries and challenges conventional understandings of the Irish literary tradition. The book concludes with an analysis of the relationship between race and masculinity in Irish characters in US and British culture, from Patriot Games to Rescue Me and The Wire, The Romans in Britain to M.I.5

This book analyzes the roots of Irish social and sexual conservatism and the dramatic change in one of the most basic areas of human experience: how we understand our roles as men and women. It looks at the relationship between sexual and cultural dissent and the long, slow role of culture in generating change. Meaney offers the first major study that sets the relationship between national and gender identities in the context of analysis of Irish identity as white identity, tracing the identification of female sexuality with foreign threat in nationalist discourse and its consequences in contemporary representations of immigrant women and their children. The study presents an extended analysis of the relationship between feminism and nationalism, and between gender and modernism. Analyzing the role of Joyce in contemporary culture and Yeats and Synge in the understanding of tradition, it also sets their work in the context of their less known female contemporaries and challenges conventional understandings of the Irish literary tradition. The book concludes with an analysis of the relationship between race and masculinity in Irish characters in US and British culture, from Patriot Games to Rescue Me and The Wire, The Romans in Britain to M.I.5

Pat Murphy's third feature film, Nora (2000), is based on Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce. The film is on one level a sumptuous historical romance, on another a feminist biopic, on yet another a complex meditation on the relationship between high modernist art and ordinary human relationships. It challenges the ways in which history and sexuality have been constructed in Irish films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Both the literary biography and the film of Nora explore the nature of sexual and aesthetic freedom. But whereas Maddox's biography illuminates an independent minded and resilient woman, Murphy's film also offers both a feminist and post-modern critique of the ethics and aesthetics of modernism. Gerardine Meaney investigates the complex relationships between these two texts, and locates the film in the context of new developments in costume drama and historical film in the 1990s.