Andrew Carpenter (Professor Emeritus, UCD) Andrew Carpenter is Emeritus Professor of English at University College Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published many books and articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish poetry in English, as well as several on Swift. He is best known for two anthologies, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003) and Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (1997). His most recent publications are The Irish Poet and the Natural World: an anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (co-edited with Lucy Collins, 2014) and an edition of The Poems of Olivia Elder (2017).

School of English

Wednesday 2 October 3-4 pm

O'Rahilly Building, Room 2.12

Over the last few years, scholars have paid considerable attention to English-language poems written by women in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland – by Katherine Philips, Mary Barber, Constantia Grierson, Olivia Elder and Mary Tighe, for instance. But what about poems from the same period that are about women? Did either women’s views of themselves or men’s views of women develop over the period? Are changes in fashion or behaviour revealed in poetry and can poems about Irishwomen of the period still amuse and interest a modern reader? This paper seeks to answer some of these question and to look, in detail, at a few of the more remarkable poems of the age that take women as their subject.