“Colleen Modernism”: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing

Scholars interested in studying twentieth-century Irish womens piece bay window make use of a rich system of wizard author monographs, intellectual biographies, and insightful critical articles as wholesome as the wealth of material provided in volumes 4 and 5 of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. A get of these studies insure the biographical links between twentieth-century Irish women writers and prestigious modernists, inform readers, for instance, that Maud Gonne encountered the Futurist Valentine de St. Point in Paris, or that bloody abash Colum hobnobbed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene ONeill, and Elinor Wylie in America. But few address in some(prenominal) sustained way how these writers engaged with modernist imperatives. In recent years, Elizabeth Bowen has been fixed convincingly among the pantheon of modernists.1 However, with a few notable exceptions, experimental Irish women writers like Brigid [End Page 94] Brophy, Mary Manning, Blanaid Sa lkeld, and Sheila Wingfield are regularly share in accounts of modernism, whereas others whose work might be claimed for this movement silence hover outside its margins.2 Kate OBrien, for example, is generally read as a realist, Dorothy Macardle charged with conformist historiography, and Mary Colum merely mined for anecdotes more than or less Joyce. Literary scholarship, in other words, has been disinclined to look for the signifi assholet contributions Irish women writers have made to modernism.

However, a surprise number of these authors-including the three examined in this essay, Elizabeth Bowen, Brigid Brophy, and Mary Manning-helped to carriage and call down high modernism s formal and thematic innovations. The glos! siness of Colleen Modernism, a terminal figure I have coined to differentiate the profound and intricate relationship of Irish women writers to international modernism, can help us post and understand the intentions, production, and reception of twentieth-century Irish women writers whose work has been excluded from discussion or admitted only on legitimate terms. A vulgarization of the... If you wishing to get a large essay, order it on our website: OrderEssay.net

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