Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists. Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists - Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats and O'Casey - resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her. In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured their own creative selves.
PART I: INTRODUCTION Mother-Ireland Calls Me PART II: SOCIAL SPACES Home and Hearth: the Mother's Social Boundaries PART II: ON THE EDGE OF DISORDER Origin, Space, Opposition: Constructing, Containing and Privileging the Maternal PART IV: SYMBOLIC SPACES Modernism and the Maternal: Appropriation of the Mother's Space and the Breakdown of the Symbolic Conclusion References Index
