Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women's Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers - Dorothy Macardle, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane - this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1399547461
• ISBN13: 9781399547468
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"