Stubborn Forms: Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Fiction, Paige Reynolds, College of the Holy Cross
Not strictly concentrated on innovation for innovation’s sake, not interested in difficulty as a means to limit access to the masses, modernism has been deployed by Irish women writers from Kate O’Brien to Sally Rooney as a means to communicate to a broad audience the complexities of individual female consciousness long hidden from view. This paper sets out the conceptual framework for a larger project in which I claim that modernism, as a “stubborn form” in contemporary fiction, urges readers to recognize the unique cultural and historical factors that have shaped the vexed relationship of Irish women to privacy across the past century.
Respondent: Cara Lewis, Indiana University Northwest