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Introduction
No full textThe introduction to this volume offers a biographical overview of Egerton's life and literary career, which continued well beyond her years of active publication (1893-1905), and provides insight into her work as a playwright, translator and mentor of younger authors throughout her life. It is remedial in that it offers corrections to ongoing mistakes in Egerton scholarship, and draws out the themes and issues considered in the essays which form the volume's chapters. It explains the revisionist agendas of the chapters and offers an argument that the works contained within the volume, when viewed as a whole, make the strongest case yet for the reclamation of Egerton's reputation as a literary moderniser, and thus firmly situate her works as among the earliest published documents to chart the path towards literary modernism, to deal in metatextual ways with the systemic abuse that attended the ongoing attempts by literary innovators such as herself to professionalise and elevate the position of the woman writer, and by extension lays the critical groundwork for a more complete restoration of her reputation as a literary pioneer and catalyst for change
Irish Women's Writing, 1878–1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty
No full textIrish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the literary landscape of Ireland, which has included far more women writers, with far more diverse identities, than hitherto acknowledged.
This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. The chapters investigate their dialogue with a contemporary politics that included the topics of education, cosmopolitanism, language, empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage 'market', the publishing industry, readership(s), the commercial market and employment
George Egerton: Terra Incognitas
No full textGeorge Egerton: Terra Incognitas is the first published work to focus solely on Egerton and her literary legacy. It covers the range and extent of Egerton's life and literary career from her emergence into the milieu of London publishing in 1893 to her dramatic works (both original and in translation) and their performance history into the 1920s. This work is an essential addition to ongoing recovery projects and is the first to focus on her 'lost' and unpublished works, mentorship of younger writers, her experiments with characterisations and themes, sociopolitical stances, innovations with form and content, and ultimately, her literary legacy. In doing so, George Egerton: Terra Incognitas reassesses Egerton's broader contribution to fin- de-siecle and early-twentieth-century literature and drama and repositions her as among the most important of the literary innovators of period, and a noteworthy precursor to later female literary modernisers, including Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf
The “Wire-Puller”: L. T. Meade, Atalanta and the Development of the Short Story
Get PDFThrough a consideration of her career as both editor of Atalanta and a short story author regularly featured in the pages of numerous periodicals including the Strand, this chapter explores and assesses L. T. Meade’s position as both a promoter and innovator of the short story form in the period of its rise to popular prominence. The chapter argues that, by regularly featuring short complete works of fiction in Atalanta and through her methods of encouraging, inspiring and challenging her girl readers (who included Virginia Woolf, Evelyn J. Sharp and Angela Brazil) to become writers and modernisers of short fiction themselves, Meade was among the earliest and most important advocates of the female-authored short story as a potentially ground-breaking and inventive fictional genre
George Egerton, James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman
No full textGeorge Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859–1945), from Co. Laois, was the New Woman author most closely associated with the Decadent movement. As such, she was also the New Woman writer most profoundly affected by the downfall of Oscar Wilde. After the Wilde trials of 1895, Egerton's connection to Decadence and New Womanhood would make her work anathema to much of the British public. This essay will argue that ongoing tendencies to situate her texts solely within the New Woman categorisation and an English cultural location have had the detrimental effect of obscuring their importance to a specifically Irish literary tradition. By examining Egerton's 1898 novel The Wheel of God, focusing on its status as an Irish Künstlerroman written from a position of exile, and drawing comparisons between it and the works of James Joyce, this essay will seek to redress this imbalance
Erin's 'revolting daughters' and Britannia : the fiction of diasporic Irish women in Britain, 1890-1916
No full textThis thesis focuses on the novels written and published by expatriate Irish women resident in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916, concentrating particularly on the ways in which their texts engaged in the dialogue and participated in the debates surrounding events of import to the political relationship between Britain and Ireland from the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell to the Easter Rising. The poet William Butler Yeats defined this era as the 'long gestation' of Ireland's violent struggle towards independence from Britain, and it is to the works of Yeats and his Revivalist cohort that critical attention has overwhelmingly turned in assessments of the role that Irish literature played in the politics of the period. The practice of privileging Revivalist texts has tended to occlude the contribution of Irish writers whose work was extrinsic to that movement, and has most notably obfuscated the participation of novels written by Irish women. This study seeks to redress the imbalance of scholarly work by taking into account the critically neglected texts of a group of Irish women writers who were living and working in Britain during the period, and were thus placed in the complex cultural locus between 'Irish' and 'English'. The work of six authors - Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M. E. Francis and Katharine Tynan - who were producing and publishing texts from just such a cultural location is the focus of this study. Between them, these writers generated nearly 500 novels, almost all of which are now out of print and few of which have received sustained scholarly attention. By excavating biographical details for each of these authors and examining a selection of their works in their relevant historical contexts, this study assesses the extent to which novels written by six Irish migrant women from varying class-based and religious backgrounds communicate the experience of living in- between two cultures and at the centre of the prevailing political and social debates of the era.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Medical and Legal Discourse and Varieties of ‘Unnatural’ Parenthood in the Works of George Egerton
No full textAs medical knowledge progressed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too did the comprehension of biologically sexed identities and the range of discourses associated with gendered attributes, behaviours and desires. Political discourse also changed in consequence of these medical findings, and in the process so, too, did legal and journalistic attitudes towards those who veered from established gender and sexual stereotypes. In response, popular opinion in Britain gradually turned against attempts to limit and conscribe the rights and roles of parents such as the New Poor Law Act (1834) and its insidious Bastardy Clause. Through a comparison of Egerton's depictions of various ways of embodying parenthood with contemporaneous juridical, medical and journalistic discourse regarding reproductive and parental rights, this chapter argues that Egerton's works consistently evidence her project of offering both correctives and alternatives to discursive constructions of parenthood that were sanctioned by law and medicine. It will argue that an imperative function of many of her texts is to draw attention to differing forms of parental/carer arrangement that conform to particular cultural/natural environments, thus providing various ways of being and becoming parental that defy and challenge medical and sociolegal perceptions of identity
'Power to Observe': Irish Women Novelists in Britain, 1890-1916
No full textThis book examines the lives and literature of six Irish novelists - Emily Lawless, L.T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M.E. Francis and Katharine Tynan - who lived and worked in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916. It assesses their contribution to the debates which defined the era: the Irish Question and the Woman Question
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