Reading the Irish Woman

The theme of this book is cultural encounter and exchange in Irish women’s lives. Using three case studies: the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism, it analyses reading and popular and consumer culture as sites of negotiation of gender roles. It traces how the circulation of ideas, fantasies and aspirations which have shaped women’s lives in actuality and in imagination and argues that there were many different ways of being a woman. Attention to women’s cultural consumption and production shows that one individual may in one day identify with representations of heroines of romantic fiction, patriots, philanthropists, literary ladies, film stars, career women, popular singers, advertising models and foreign missionaries. The processes of cultural consumption, production and exchange provide evidence of women’s agency, aspirations and activities within and far beyond the domestic sphere

Handwriting Analysis on the Diaries of Rosamond Jacob

Handwriting is an art form that most people learn at an early age. Each person's writing style is unique with small changes as we grow older and as our mood changes. Here we analyse handwritten text in a culturally significant personal diary. We compare changes in handwriting and relate this to the sentiment of the written material and to the topic of diary entries. We identify handwritten text from digitised images and generate a canonical form for words using shape matching to compare how the same handwritten word appears over a period of time. For determining the sentiment of diary entries, we use the Hedonometer, a dictionary-based approach to scoring sentiment. We apply these techniques to the historical diary entries of Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960), an Irish writer and political activist whose daily diary entries report on the major events in Ireland during the first half of the last century.Comment: International Conference on Content-based Multimedia Indexing, September 20--22, 2023, Orleans, Franc

Waking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright\u27s Narrators in Mourning

Reflecting in 2008 on the link between her groundbreaking work on gender and her more recent work on war, Judith Butler proposed a relationship between liveable and grievable lives: \u27it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable\u27. This essay takes Butler\u27s exploration of the \u27politics of mourning\u27 as its starting place for a reading of The Gathering and of the short story, \u27My Little Sister\u27 from Taking Pictures

Waking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright's Narrators in Mourning

Reflecting in 2008 on the link between her groundbreaking work on gender and her more recent work on war, Judith Butler proposed a relationship between liveable and grievable lives: 'it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable'. This essay takes Butler's exploration of the 'politics of mourning' as its starting place for a reading of The Gathering and of the short story, 'My Little Sister' from Taking Pictures

Long Day's Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal Loss

Long Day's journey into Night may seem a strange starting place for a feminist analysis of modernism and post-modernism. Yet even the most conservative criticism reads this play as an enactment and embodiment of loss, specifically loss of the mother. That loss is rarely seen in the context of a more general "loss", a cultural loss of legitimacy and authenticity, endemic in and enabling modernism, articulated as "disinheritance" by an Other "coded as feminine.

History Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry

Recent years have seen a very rapid development in women's poetry in Ireland, a development which is part of a much wider one in women's writing and culture. The prevalence of poetry and the relative scarcity of prose in this movement is specific to Ireland and a significant departure from the pattern elsewhere. The strength of the tradition of women's fiction and the fragmentary nature of the tradition in poetry have tended to produce first an increasingly self-conscious feminist fiction, then an upsurge of women's poetry which attempts to re-define the poetic tradition and women's relation to it

Sex and Nation Women in Irish Culture and Politics

The aim of this pamphlet is to challenge the assumptions made by and about the women's movement in Ireland. It is to some extent a retrospective exercise, an attempt to analyse and respond to some of the ideas put forward in previous pamphlets in this series. It is, more importantly, an attempt to suggest directions in which Irish feminism can move in the future, an attempt to learn from the reverses and successes of the 1980s and to identify opportunities which will be available to Irish feminism in the 1990s