Launch of Paige Reynolds' "Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing"

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2024) examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book.

The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, publishes on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is author of Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2024) and Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge UP, 2007). She also has edited the collections Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016), The New Irish Studies (Cambridge UP, 2020), and (with Eric Falci) Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Paige will be in conversation with Emily C. Bloom, Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art was published with St. Martin’s Press in 2024. Her first book, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, 1931-1968 (Oxford, 2016) examines the role of public broadcasting in shaping twentieth-century literature. Her articles have appeared in Public Books, Eire-Ireland, The Irish Times, and elsewhere.

Host or Publisher Glucksman Ireland House NYU