Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry
Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry
Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Womens Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinov explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eilan N Chuilleanin, Nuala N Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinov engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poetsincluding Vona Groarke, Caitrona OReilly, Sinad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodhathis book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nations canon. ... Show More Show Less