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This book focuses on the emergence of women poets from the 1980s to the present in both Ireland and Galicia. Departing from common ground in shared myths and comparable political and social circumstances, each contributor to this volume looks into central aspects of Irish and Galician identity issues, which range from configurations of the nation, nature and feminine paradigms, to the poets' elaborations on their own literary practice. The comparative approach followed shows both that questions raised in one community can find relevant answers in the other and that reciprocal knowledge helps to disseminate the writers' work - and the criticism of it - beyond their respective national borders. This collection of essays and interviews also provides both poets and critics with a mutual space in which to voice their concerns, thus bringing down the barrier that is often raised artificially between these two literary activities.
List of contents
Contents: Manuela Palacios/Laura Lojo: Poetry, Gender and Transnational Bonds: An Introduction - María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia/Cristina Fernández-Méndez: «Longer and Longer Sentences Prove Me Wholly Female»: Medbh McGuckian and Feminism(s) - Manuel Fernández-Rodríguez: Primitive Alchemy: Alienness in Olga Novo - Manuela Palacios: The Course of Nature: An Ecofeminist Reading of Contemporary Irish and Galician Women Poets - María Xesús Nogueira: Dolls, Princesses and Cinderellas: New Feminine Representations in Contemporary Galician Women's Poetry - Laura Lojo: The Poetics of Motherhood in Contemporary Irish Women's Verse - Carmen Blanco: Alicia in Galicia: Sex and Place - Mary O'Donnell: Irish Women and Writing: An Overview of the Journey from Imagination into Print, 1980-2008 - Luz Pichel: Pieces of Letters from My Bedroom - Laura Lojo: «Making Sense of Wilderness» through the Written Word: An Interview with Anne Le Marquand Hartigan - María Xesús Nogueira: Most Faithful Stories: An Interview with Luz Pozo-Garza.
About the author
The Editors: Manuela Palacios is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She has directed the national research project `Poetry and Gender: Contemporary Irish and Galician Women Poets¿. Her publications include translations of European poetry and narrative, monographs on Virginia Woolf¿s pictorial imagery and Shakespeare¿s Richard III, journal articles on ecocriticism, translation studies and twentieth-century writers, and book chapters on literature, the visual arts and women¿s studies.
Laura Lojo is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She is the author of a book on Virginia Woolf¿s short fiction along with several book chapters and essays in literary journals on varied topics, such as the reception of British modernism in Spanish-speaking countries, Irish women¿s poetry, women¿s studies and comparative literature.
Report
«[The] introduction to (this) volume, for instance, 'Poetry, Gender and Transnational Bonds' should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the subject matter because of the unique combination of historical events that connect both peoples and the survey of thematic similarities and social conditions that bond together Galician and Irish women poets: politics, religion, language and land. (...) The joining together of critical perspectives and personal insights make this collection a highly recommended book for scholars and students of Irish and Galician literature alike.» (José Francisco Fernández, Estudios Irlandeses)
«This volume, a much-needed addition to the field of Irish and Galician Studies, is also a pleasant and illuminating read. The editors are worthy of praise for their incisive and thought-provoking renewal of the writing bonds between contemporary women poets who are entwined, rather than separated, by the Atlantic.» (Vanessa Silva Fernández, Galicia 21)
