Irish Studies Seminar: Anne Jamison

From the Big Bad Wolf in County Kerry to the Little Mermaid in the depths of Lough Neagh, Ireland’s 19th-century women writers engaged in oft-times playful and humorous revisions of European fairy tales and folklore, but also – and more soberly – interrogated the social and literary conventions of the Victorian fairy tale within Irish socio-cultural disquiet. While fairy tale literature has long been recognised in Victorian culture as a site of literary production that reflected broader adult anxieties and social concerns, 19th-century Irish women writers of the genre have been little considered within these contexts. This seminar attempts to redress this gap through a critical reading of Rosa Mulholland’s ‘The Girl From Under the Lake’ (1881), a significant revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837). Transposing Andersen’s tale of female love and self-sacrifice to the shores of Ireland, this paper explores how Mulholland’s fairy tale becomes a site of challenge to both colonial rule in late 19th-century Ireland, as well as the gendered conventions that condemn Andersen’s original female protagonist to her tragic fate.

This seminar is both in-person in 27UQ/01/003 and online via MS Teams. Please indicate your mode of attendance when registering.

Host or Publisher Institute of Irish Studies