Irishness in North American Women's Writing, 1st ed. 2021 Transatlantic Affinities

This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

1. Transatlantic Affinities: Irishness in North American Women’s Writing.- 2. Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy.- 3.Irish-American Immigrant Histories and Readings of Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan.- 4. ‘A Genetic Trait’: Alice McDermott’s Irish America.- 5. The Lonely Voice: Alice Munro and Ireland.- 6. Irish-Canadian Connections: Jane Urquhart’s Historical Fictions.- 7. Transatlantic Encounters in the Writing of Emma Donoghue.

Ellen McWilliams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009) and Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (2013) and has received a number of awards for research, including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholar Award.