Irish Women Novelists and European Opera, Matthew Reznicek
Tracing “operatic moments,” fleeting references and echoes of European music-drama, in novels by Irish women writers demonstrates that these narratives not only look backward to moments of communal belonging in an age of fragmented community but also to look forward as they construct an aesthetic, social, and political mythology of belonging that is Irish, Anglo-Irish, and European. By focusing on the national community in Sydney Owenson and Gioachino Rossini as well in Elizabeth Bowen and Richard Wagner, “Stages of Belonging” reveals the ways in which these writers look beyond national boundaries toward a more complex social and aesthetic tradition.
Respondent: Joseph Heininger, Dominican University