UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland" edited by A. Bradley and M. Valiulis

Edited by Anthony Bradley and Maryann Valiulis

Trenchant essays on twentieth-century Irish history and culture

This timely collection of essays focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in Irish history, biography, language, literature, and drama. While the contributors employ a variety of methodological and critical perspectives, they share the conviction that the gendering of Ireland—not only of the nation, but of actual Irish men and women—is a construction of culture and ideology and not simply one of nature.

The essays address such topics as the recent divorce referendum; homoerotic desire in the Irish literary renaissance and in recent drama and film; Irish women's history; intersections of gender with nationalism and colonialism; the Irish language and feminism; contemporary Irish poetry; the significance of gender in emigration from Ireland to the United States; and the political importance of the work of Irish religious women in the first half of the century.

The book's concern with gender and sexuality makes possible a series of interweaving narratives that at once complicate and enrich our understanding of what it means to be Irish.

Contributors include Guinn Batten, Angela Bourke, Carol Coulter, Elizabeth Cullingford, Mary Daly, Adrian Frazier, Dillon Johnston, Margaret MacCurtain, Lucy McDiarmid, Maureen Murphy, Antoinette Quinn, Catherine Shannon, and Margaret Ward.

Anthony Bradley is professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Maryann Valiulis is director of the Centre for Women's Studies at Trinity College, Dublin.

Irish Studies / Gender Studies
336 pp.
LC 97-26859
$50.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-130-9
$22.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-131-7
1997
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Published in association with the American Conference for Irish Studies

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