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8 results

  • Introduction I

  • Edited by Ailbhe Darcy, Cardiff University, David Wheatley, University of Aberdeen
  • Book:
    A History of Irish Women's Poetry
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021, pp 1-23

  • Summary

    In the millennial year 2000, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin published an essay on the nineteenth-century poet Speranza, claiming her as a foremother. Ní Chuilleanáin asks: ‘what use our female predecessors are to us as writers, what is the function of model, teacher, exemplar?’3 What Irish women poets seek when they conjure foremothers is continuity: a ‘women’s tradition’ that legitimises the writing of their own poetry; influence aside, a sense of ‘the woman writer as embodied, creative agent in the process of textual production’, to use Jennie Batchelor’s phrase.

A History of Irish Women's Poetry
  • Edited by Ailbhe Darcy, David Wheatley
  • Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021
  • A History of Irish Women's Poetry is a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women's poetry from earliest times to the present day. It reads Irish women's poetry through many prisms – mythology, gender, history, the nation – and most importantly, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures, such as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women's poetry has been produced and received, from the anonymous work of the early medieval period, through the bardic age, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival, and the advent of modernity. As capacious as it is diverse, this book is an essential contribution to scholarship in the field.