Full Description
Motherhood, Infertility and Vulnerability in Contemporary Irish Literature brings together established and emerging scholars, alongside contributions by acclaimed Irish authors Emilie Pine and Deirdre Sullivan, to situate literary representations of motherhood within the entanglements of the nation's transitory sociocultural terrain. Across works of fiction, life writing, memoir and more experimental prose, as well as theatre, the essays in this collection trace how contemporary Irish women writers are articulating the complexities—both individual and shared—of mothering and not mothering in the twenty-first century.
With a particular focus on infertility and the vulnerabilities that inhere in mothering, the chapters attend to motherhood as experience, identity and institution; to not-motherhood in both its chosen and imposed forms; and to the vulnerabilities that accompany pregnancy, birthing, child-raising and caregiving. In doing so, the collection also considers how Irish authors are negotiating the lingering figure of Mother Ireland and giving voice to experiences long marked by silence and shame.
Collectively, the volume argues that contemporary representations of motherhood in Irish literature are both rewriting cultural memory and speaking boldly to a complex present; showcasing aesthetic innovation, affective weight and transformative power.
Contents
Chapter 1:Introduction - Mothering and Not Mothering: Shaping the Contemporary Irish Maternal Imaginary.- Chapter 2: Womaning up to the Motherhood Myth: Surviving Maternal Self-loss, Solitude and Regret in Recent Irish Fiction.- Chapter 3: Tired, Lonely, and Lost: Motherhood and Mental Disorder in Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor.- Chapter 4: Mutteroman: Narratives of Matrescence in Contemporary Irish Literature: An Analysis of Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat (2020), Alice Kinsella's Milk: On Motherhood and Madness (2023) and Kerri ní Dochartaigh's Cacophony of Bone (2023).- Chapter 5: "Simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing": Motherhood as the Millennial Happy Ending in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).- Chapter 6: The Destructive Presence and Absence of the Mother Figure in Anna Burns's No Bones and Little Constructions.- Chapter 7: Motherhood and Fatherhood in Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These.- Chapter 8: "A mother is not an endless thing": Undoing the Spectral Mother in Sally Rooney's Fiction.- Chapter 9: Presence as Absence: Emilie Pine's Language of Infertility.- Chapter 10: From Disenfranchised Grief to Magical Transformations: Deirdre Sullivan's Posthuman Literary Representations of Stillbirth Trauma.- Chapter 11: Burdened Bodies: Reproductive Oppression, Institutional Trauma, and Literary Resistance in Contemporary Irish Women's Writing.- Chapter 12: Queerness at the Intersection of Motherhood, Vulnerability and Irishness: An Analysis of Passage (2001) by Deirdre Kinahan.- Chapter 13: Alternative Motherhoods in Lesbian Communities: Chosen Families in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction.
