Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns
By Naoise Murphy
Edinburgh UP, 2025
ISBN: 9781399547468
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html
A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing
- Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
- Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
- Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past
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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.
"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania
Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.
