Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018

Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 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.

Jane Elizabeth Dougherty is Associate 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. She is a specialist in Irish women’s literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries and teaches courses on Irish literature and culture, cultural studies and composition.