Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Chapter 1 ‘A World of Hotels and Gaols’: Women Novelists and the Spaces of Irish Modernism, 1930–32
- Chapter 2 ‘I Knew What It Meant / Not to Be at All’: Death and the (Modernist) Afterlife in the Work of Irish Women Poets of the 1940s
- Chapter 3 ‘Whatever Is Given / Can Always Be Reimagined’: Seamus Heaney's Indefinite Modernism
- Chapter 4 James Joyce and the Lives of Edna O'Brien
- Chapter 5 Modernist Topoi and Late Modernist Praxis in Recent Irish Poetry (with Special Reference to the Work of David Lloyd)
- Chapter 6 ‘Amach Leis!’ (Out with It!): Modernist Inheritances in Micheál Ó Conghaile's ‘Athair’ (‘Father’)
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter 2 - ‘I Knew What It Meant / Not to Be at All’: Death and the (Modernist) Afterlife in the Work of Irish Women Poets of the 1940s
from Section One - LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Chapter 1 ‘A World of Hotels and Gaols’: Women Novelists and the Spaces of Irish Modernism, 1930–32
- Chapter 2 ‘I Knew What It Meant / Not to Be at All’: Death and the (Modernist) Afterlife in the Work of Irish Women Poets of the 1940s
- Chapter 3 ‘Whatever Is Given / Can Always Be Reimagined’: Seamus Heaney's Indefinite Modernism
- Chapter 4 James Joyce and the Lives of Edna O'Brien
- Chapter 5 Modernist Topoi and Late Modernist Praxis in Recent Irish Poetry (with Special Reference to the Work of David Lloyd)
- Chapter 6 ‘Amach Leis!’ (Out with It!): Modernist Inheritances in Micheál Ó Conghaile's ‘Athair’ (‘Father’)
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The term ‘modernist afterlife’ brings into sharp relief the complex question of literary temporalities. The difficulty in establishing a chronology of modernist writing inevitably troubles our evaluation of its legacy, our ability to tell its ‘life’ from its ‘afterlife’. In different geographical settings, as well as in different art forms, various patterns of formal development and thematic preoccupation can be traced, yet even within these situations there are multiple modernisms, rather than a single, coherent movement. Tyrus Miller has remarked on the capacity of late modernist texts to express the ‘aging and decline’ of modernism at the same time as they anticipate future developments. For writers in Ireland, many of whom came belatedly to modernism, the durational aspects of the movement may have seemed less clear. Ireland's cultural development in the early decades of the twentieth century was dominated by the Irish Literary Revival, which has usually been seen as antithetical to modernism. However, as Terence Brown points out, both movements play with the intersection between ‘historical time and mythological timelessness’. For revivalists and for modernists the relationship between the individual and the collective is placed within a temporal framework; the influence of both movements meant that both lyric and modernist subjects in Irish poetry tend to be understood through their shifting relationship to time. For Irish women poets of the twenties and thirties, the need to negotiate between traditional and experimental forms shed particular light on the temporalities of the female subject. In particular, the representation of death and afterlife allowed women poets to explore anxieties concerning their formation and endurance as creative artists.
The relationship between women poets and modernism in Ireland is, in turn, a complex one. Broadly speaking, international modernism moved through a period in the first decade of the twentieth century when issues of gender and sexuality were of key importance, to a phase around mid-century when modernist texts tended to be viewed within a gender-neutral frame. This pattern was reflected in approaches to literary criticism, too, as Cristanne Miller has observed: ‘Much early feminist criticism on female poets argued for the consideration of a separate women's tradition of poetry, constructed either in parallel or in opposition to men's.
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- Information
- Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 23 - 34Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016