School of English

Ailbhe McDaid

13 March 3-4 pm

O'Rahilly Building Room 2.12

Abstract: Stories of action dominate our understanding of the literature of conflict. What though of the experiences of civilians, most often women and children on the domestic front, who are psychologically, practically and politically affected by war? This paper examines the possibilities of reading Irish conflict literature from a gendered perspective, drawing on frameworks of women-and-war theory and memory theory. In proposing a reconsideration of how and what we read as conflict literature, this paper will explore the literary strategies deployed in contemporaneous works by participants/observers of the the conflict, including Dorothy Macardle, Rosamond Jacob and Emily Ussher, the affective reverberations of familial trauma in works by Maeve Brennan and Éiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and the impulse to recuperation in recent works by Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Martina Evans.

Dr Ailbhe McDaid is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of English at UCC, working on her project Domestic Disruptions: Women, Conflict and Literature, 1914-1923. Her book, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.