Queering Irish Women's Writing in the Twentieth Century
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation examines the haunted quality of Ireland’s modernity through the fiction of mid-twentieth-century Irish women writers Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. Seeking out the ghosts of modern Ireland, I turn to queer ways of reading, paying attention to the marginal and the disavowed. This new reading queers the archive of twentieth-century Ireland, disrupting common-sense narratives of modernity and modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Irish women’s writing is entangled in reductive narratives of modernisation that create a feel-good account of contemporary Ireland, disavowing the structures of domination and exclusion that continue to define the country. Ireland’s modernity is haunted; bad feelings cannot be banished to the over-and-done-with past, but instead erupt in chaotic and disturbing ways in the modern nation. Contending with the violence of the official archive, a particularly vexed issue in the context of Ireland’s legacies of institutional abuse, this dissertation argues for a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings as a form of narrative resistance. In their improper responses to the imperatives of the post-independence state, Bowen, O’Brien, Keane and Macardle dwell on bad and backward feelings that disrupt the forward-moving, feel-good temporality of modernity. Where the state valorises the progressive time of reproduction, family and nation, these writers indulge in illicit, unrespectable affects. Bringing resources from queer, trans and postcolonial theory into dialogue with feminist criticism, this queering of Irish women’s writing delves into the shadow side of Irish modernity. Chapter One reads Dorothy Macardle’s middlebrow gothic novels for their critique of the postcolonial carceral state. Macardle’s (re)publication history shows how women writers haunt the mainstream, but are themselves haunted by the violences enacted on racially and sexually Othered subjects. Her re…
abstract: This dissertation examines the haunted quality of Ireland’s modernity through the fiction of mid-twentieth-century Irish women writers Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane. Seeking out the ghosts of modern Ireland, I turn to queer ways of reading, paying attention to the marginal and the disavowed. This new reading queers the archive of twentieth-century Ireland, disrupting common-sense narratives of modernity and modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Irish women’s writing is entangled in reductive narratives of modernisation that create a feel-good account of contemporary Ireland, disavowing the structures of domination and exclusion that continue to define the country. Ireland’s modernity is haunted; bad feelings cannot be banished to the over-and-done-with past, but instead erupt in chaotic and disturbing ways in the modern nation. Contending with the violence of the official archive, a particularly vexed issue in the context of Ireland’s legacies of institutional abuse, this dissertation argues for a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings as a form of narrative resistance. In their improper responses to the imperatives of the post-independence state, Bowen, O’Brien, Keane and Macardle dwell on bad and backward feelings that disrupt the forward-moving, feel-good temporality of modernity. Where the state valorises the progressive time of reproduction, family and nation, these writers indulge in illicit, unrespectable affects. Bringing resources from queer, trans and postcolonial theory into dialogue with feminist criticism, this queering of Irish women’s writing delves into the shadow side of Irish modernity. Chapter One reads Dorothy Macardle’s middlebrow gothic novels for their critique of the postcolonial carceral state. Macardle’s (re)publication history shows how women writers haunt the mainstream, but are themselves haunted by the violences enacted on racially and sexually Othered subjects. Her re…
author: Murphy, Naoise
language: eng
keywords: Ireland, queer, twentieth-century, women's writing
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/f032aa67-af5a-4d13-b760-e86036d1e589/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2023-05-03
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:57Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.103260