Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 (Edinburgh UP, 2024) studies narratives of Irish female and feminized development, arguing that these postmodern narratives present Irish female maturation as disordered and often deliberately disorderly. The first full-length study of the Irish female coming of age story, the book develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology, derived from the belated oedipalization of Joyce’s bildungsheld, to read these stories. This study argues that all Irish maturation stories are shaped by the uneven and belated maturation story of the Irish republic itself, which took as its avatar the Irish woman, whose citizenship in that republic was unrealized, as indeed was her citizenship in an Irish republic of letters. Dougherty takes the writing of Irish women as seriously as other critics have taken Joyce’s work.

Discusses texts by James Joyce, John McGahern, Hannah Lynch, Kate O’Brien, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Dervla Murphy, Clare Boylan, Nuala O’Faolain, Eavan Boland, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Éilís ní Dhuibhne, Melatu Uche Okorie, and Soula Emmanuel
Examines the form, narration, and content of fictional, non-fictional, and national narratives
Develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology
Synthesizes historical, sociojuridical, feminist, post-colonial, and literary historical narratives of Irish development

Jane Elizabeth Dougherty is Professor in the School of Literature, Writing and Digital Humanities and affiliate faculty in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France).

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