IASIL 2005 Charles University, Prague
Ireland – A Global Village?
25-28 July 2005

Moving into Modernity: Irish Women Modernists

The field of modern Irish women’s writing is only now beginning to be mapped with any critical density. This panel explores the engagements with modernity that appear with such intensity in the work of several Irish women writers, from Rosa Mulholland to Dorothy Macardle to Elizabeth Bowen. Macardle, much better know for her work as a nationalist historian of Ireland, was also an accomplished writer of short stories and novels, and Jennifer Molidor’s paper offers a radical new reading of Macardle’s work in the context of the constrictions and symbolic strictures/structures of the Free State. Sian White claims Elizabeth Bowen for a ‘late modernist’ and traces in her novel A World of Love a complex stylistic subterfuge, whereby Bowen both critiques and engages with the modern and with an earlier modernism. Heather Edwards’s paper examines the central role of movement in modern Irish women’s fiction, and argues that it is through the experience of movement – between country and city in particular – that Irish women encounter and write modernity.

Chair: Mary Burgess (University of Notre Dame)

Panellists:
Jennifer Molidor (University of Notre Dame)
“Dying for Ireland: ‘Mother Ireland,’ Modernity and Mediation in the Stories of Dorothy Macardle – 1914-1937”

Sian White (University of Notre Dame)
‘I simply feel I’m more than simply me’: Modernist innovation and the innovation of moderinism in Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love.

Heather Edwards (University of Notre Dame)
Modernity through Movement: Irish Women’s Experiences of Modernity in the works of Rosa Mulholland and Elizabeth Bowen