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Following the recent advancements in Irish lesbian politics, North and South, lesbian writing is attracting more attention from scholarly audiences, making this body of work particularly timely. Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time is an attestation of a historical presence of lesbians in Irish literature, as it analyses the progression of Irish lesbian narrative over the past two centuries, while verifying key characteristics of time periods that correspond with the model of development. It also investigates Irish lesbian activist literature, writing from diaspora, and fiction published around the time of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts and later the inclusion of same-sex marriage in Irish and Northern Irish laws.
The book examines authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorcey, Anna Livia, Shani Mootoo, and Hilary McCollum, whose inclusion of lesbian desire to the Irish literary canon proves an invaluable contribution.
List of contents
Contents: Covert Representations of Lesbian Desire in Fin- de- siècle Fictions by Irish New Woman Writers and the Historical Antecedents in Earlier Irish Literature: 1801- 1910 - Lesbian Continuum and Lesbian Desire as Implicitly Encoded in the Works of Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien and Molly Keane: 1927- 1934 - Lesbian Existence in the Post- War Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien and Edna O'Brien: 1949- 1988 - Towards More Overt Representations of Lesbian Desire: 1989- 2007 - Lesbian Writing from Irish Diaspora: 1982- 2008 - Twenty- First- Century Representations of Lesbian Desire in Northern Irish Fiction and Drama: 1922- 2018 - Some Conclusions: Into the Future of (Irish) Lesbian Writing.
About the author
Anna Charczun completed her PhD at Brunel University London in 2019, where she received the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Doctoral Research in the same year. Her research interests include Irish women's writing, with an emphasis on lesbian writing. She has published on Irish lesbian writing at the end of the twentieth century and from diaspora.
