International in scope and based on primary research, this book gathers twelve new essays by critics including both well-established and newer voices. It aims to stimulate further enquiry, research and critical reflection, in sceptical, analytic or celebratory modes, on the riches of Irish literary texts and traditions. The collection discusses texts from the early 18th century to the present. It also addresses those meta-narratives by which we understand and mediate these riches for contemporary and future use. The cumulative effect is to call into question, often in new contexts, master narratives of Irish studies. Some essays focus on the aesthetic - a vital category of discussion about a national literature - and its interweaving with ideological purposes. Others concentrate on different phases of the retrieval of women's texts previously occluded by gender bias in canon formation. A central theme is the need to renegotiate the relations of feminism with nationalism and to transact the potential contest of these two important narratives, each possessing powerful emancipatory force. Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives contributes incisively to contemporary debates about Irish culture, gender and ideology.

Contributors - Acknowledgements - Patricia Coughlan: Introduction - Clíona Ó Gallchoir: Foreign Tyrants and Domestic Tyrants: the Public, the Private and Eighteenth-Century Irish Women's Writing - Kathryn Conrad: 'Keening the Nation:The Bean Chaointethe Sean Bhean Bhocht and Women's Lament in Irish Nationalist Narrative' - Heidi Hansson: Selina Bunbury, the Pope and the Question of Location - Tina O'Toole: 'Nomadic Subjects' in Katherine Cecil Thurston'sMaxKathy D'Arcy: 'Almost Forgotten Names': Irish Women Poets of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s - Bríona Nic Dhiarmada: The Love Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - Borbála Faragó: '''I am the Place in Which Things Happen'': Invisible Immigrant Women Poets of Ireland' - Giovanna Tallone: Past, Present and Future. Patterns of Otherness in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fiction - Elke D'hoker: Reclaiming Feminine Identities: Anne Enright'sThe Wig My Father WoreSusan Cahill: 'A Greedy Girl' and a 'National Thing': Gender and History in Anne Enright'sThe Pleasure of Eliza LynchClaire Bracken: Becoming-Mother-Machine: The Event of Field Day Vols IV & V - Moynagh Sullivan: Raising the Veil: Mystery, Myth, and Melancholia in Irish Studies - Index