Skip to main content
Palgrave Macmillan

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

  • Broadens the context in which poetry by women has mostly been discussed
  • Contributes simultaneously to two fields, both Gaelic literary studies and anglophone Irish literary criticism
  • Offers an overview of the merits and pitfalls of literary feminism, but also proposes vistas of a new canon

Part of the book series: New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature (NDIIAL)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

eBook USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. New Lands for New Words

  2. Secret Scripts

Keywords

About this book

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinová engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers’ uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets—including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha—this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation’s canon.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Daniela Theinová

About the author

Daniela Theinová is Senior Lecturer in the English Department and a member of the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She has contributed to Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry (2017) and A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (2020). Her translations include poetry by Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Aifric Mac Aodha. 

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us