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This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.
9780719075636_4_008.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 142 8 Architectural metaphors: representations of the house in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke Lucy Collins Feminist criticism frequently employs metaphors of space to interrogate the position of women within society and their ability to articulate that position to a wider world. The idea of ‘clearing a space’ from which to speak suggests that for women freedom of expression can only be achieved in ‘empty’ space, space that is unmarked by ideological and aesthetic convictions. Yet such
as it is amongst their male counterparts. The more established figures of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, 9780719075636_4_007.qxd 16/2/09 9:25 AM Page 133 Scattered and diverse 133 Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin have been joined by a wave of interesting poets with a broad range of interests, including Sinéad Morrissey, Vona Groarke, Paula Meehan, Kerry Hardie and Colette Bryce. In her chapter in this volume, Lucy Collins perceptively traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Ní Chuilleanáin and Groarke. She highlights the refreshing
Inglis, who claims that ‘[m]any see [foreigners] as a threat and believe that they can never become truly Irish. And yet, on many occasions, there was a national outpouring of sympathy and concern for particular individuals. It may well be that such concern emerges when people relate to the “other” as an individual rather than as a member of a group. In other words, the individual does not take on the stigma of the group’ (2008: 110). 5 The concept ‘foreignising’ is evoked in Vona Groarke’s poetic journal ‘“Foreignism”: A Philadelphia Diary’, published in the Dublin