Molly Fox's Birthday

Molly Fox's Birthday
Author: Deirdre Madden
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2010-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429935278

A Finalist for the Orange Prize It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.

Time Present and Time Past

Time Present and Time Past
Author: Deirdre Madden
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571290884

Fintan Buckley is a pleasant, rather conventional and unimaginative man, who works as a legal adviser in an import/export firm in Dublin. He lives in Howth and is married to Colette. They have two sons who are at university, and a small daughter. As he goes about his life, working and spending time with his family, Fintan begins to experience states of altered consciousness and auditory hallucinations, which seem to take him out of a linear experience of time. He becomes interested in how we remember or imagine the past, an interest trigged by becoming aware of early photography, particularly early colour photography. He also finds himself thinking more about his own past, including time spent holidaying in the north of Ireland as a child with his father's family. Over the years he has become distanced from them, and in the course of the novel this link is re-established and helps to bring him understanding and peace, although in a most unexpected way. Time Present and Time Past, Deirdre Madden's eighth novel for adults, is about time: about how not just daily life and one's own, or one's family's past, intersect with each other.

Stone Fox Bride

Stone Fox Bride
Author: Molly Rosen Guy
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0812998103

Ditch the storybook wedding, banish Bridezilla, and walk down the aisle in truth and in style: You are a Stone Fox Bride and this is your bridal guide. Molly Rosen Guy founded the brand Stone Fox Bride as an alternative to outdated, plastic-princess wedding culture. Her stylish and subversive approach is being embraced by creative, modern brides who believe in love and romance, but have no interest in running off into the sunset. In an inspiring mix of intimate storytelling, gorgeous visuals, and candid advice, with an aesthetic that channels Bianca Jagger in a white tux rather than Cinderella in a frilly gown, Molly Rosen Guy—your cool, hippie chic guide through the wilds of wedding planning—encourages brides-to-be, and their ladies in tow, to say no to all things phony, frilly, and silly. Featuring personal essays that explore the nuances of the process, including a raw, unairbrushed look at the realities of the early days of marriage, she tells us that a Stone Fox Bride should never sacrifice her style, her story, or her sanity to please others; she reassures us that weddings don't have to be free of confusion, shades of gray, or cellulite; and reminds us that marriage, like love, is equal parts complicated and beautiful. Praise for Molly Rosen Guy and the Stone Fox Bride phenomenon “The current wedding-wear darling of the jammin’ and Instagrammin’ set [offers] an insouciant, antiestablishment approach to weddings.”—The New York Times “[Molly Rosen Guy is] making waves in the bridal industry thanks to her eclectic eye and refusal to conform to clichéd traditions.”—W “Molly Rosen Guy built a business filling the needs of women who long for something more than your run-of-the-mill, princess-y flou for their big day.”—Vogue

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts

Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts
Author:
Publisher: Brill
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401208565

This collection focuses on texts that address the other arts – from painting to photography, from the stage to the screen, and from avant-garde experiments to mass culture. Despite their diversity of object and approach, the essays in Relational Designs coalesce around the argument that representations are defined by relations and dynamics, rather than intrinsic features. This rationale is supported by the discourses and methodologies favoured by the book’s contributors: their approaches offer a cross section of the intellectual and critical environment of our time. The book illustrates the critical possibilities that derive from the broad range of modes of inquiry - poststructuralist criticism, gender studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism – that the book’s four sections bring to bear on a wealth of intermedial practices. But Relational Designs compounds such critical emphases with the voice of the practitioner: the book is rounded off by an interview in which a contemporary novelist discusses her attraction to the other arts in terms that extend the book’s insights and bridge the gap between academic discourse and artistic practice.

Discourses That Matter

Discourses That Matter
Author: Maria José Canelo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443853283

How can English and American Studies be instrumental to conceptualizing the deep instability we are presently facing? How can they address the coordinates of this instability, such as war, terrorism, the current economic and financial crisis, and the consequent myriad forms of deprivation and fear? How can they tackle the strategies of de-humanization, invisibility, and the naturalization of inequality and injustice entailed in contemporary discourses? This anthology grew out of an awareness of the need to debate the role of English and American Studies both in the present context and in relation to the so-called demise of the Humanities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s rethinking of materiality as the effect of power, in her study Bodies That Matter (1993), we locate this collection of essays at the crossroads of discourse and power, while we expect the work collected here to highlight the ability of discourses to materialize in, or as, truth, and as such to support or decry particular constituencies. Discourses therefore matter to us as products and vehicles of power relations that can be subject to the analytical and interpretative tools of English and American Studies. Our idea was to challenge especially young scholars to position their research concerning the ability of their fields to be discourses that matter; in the case in point, to be critical practices that make an active intervention in current debates. By focusing on matters such as language as witness to the world, representations of gender, race, and ethnicity, performative discourses, exceptionalism and power, and interculturality, these essays pursue the chance to deepen, enlarge, and question both literary and cultural phenomena, their established critical readings, and the strategies deployed in representations. Finally, English and American Studies in the present collection demonstrate their affiliation to the Humanities by exploring the numerous possibilities offered by their discourses: their ability to foster critical thought, allowing us to think for (and outside) ourselves, their capacity to test, argue, and question, and their profound imaginative potential.

Rhythms of Writing

Rhythms of Writing
Author: Helena Wulff
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000190013

This is the first anthropological study of writers, writing and contemporary literary culture. Drawing on the flourishing literary scene in Ireland as the basis for her research, Helena Wulff explores the social world of contemporary Irish writers, examining fiction, novels, short stories as well as journalism. Discussing writers such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Frank McCourt, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Colum McCann, David Park, and Joseph O ́Connor, Wulff reveals how the making of a writer’s career is built on the ‘rhythms of writing’: long hours of writing in solitude alternate with public events such as book readings and media appearances. Destined to launch a new field of enquiry, Rhythms of Writing is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, literary studies, creative writing, cultural studies, and Irish studies.

Deirdre Madden

Deirdre Madden
Author: Anne Fogarty
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526118947

The Irish writer, Deirdre Madden, has written key novels about the Northern Irish Troubles and about contemporary Ireland. In these works, she weighs up the aftermath of violence and the impact of the shift to a more open but materialist society in the country overall. Memory, trauma, and the abiding but elusive links between the past and the present are central concerns of her fiction. This pioneering set of essays by leading experts in Irish Studies explores the many dimensions of her novels from a wide variety of perspectives. Madden’s skill at interweaving novels of ideas with artist novels that draw out the complex inner predicaments of her characters is highlighted. States of dislocation are concentrated on in her texts, but also the quest for a home in the world and a lasting set of values that allows for personal integrity and authenticity. These multifaceted explorations bear out the compelling and enduring aspects of Madden’s highly regarded novels.

A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature

A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature
Author: Heather Ingman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1010
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108654584

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of writing by women in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. It covers literature in all genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as life-writing and unpublished writing, and addresses work in both English and Irish. The chapters are authored by leading experts in their field, giving readers an introduction to cutting edge research on each period and topic. Survey chapters give an essential historical overview, and are complemented by a focus on selected topics such as the short story, and key figures whose relationship to the narrative of Irish literary history is analysed and reconsidered. Demonstrating the pioneering achievements of a huge number of many hitherto neglected writers, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature makes a critical intervention in Irish literary history.

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing
Author: Paige Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198881053

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide
Author: Molly Keane
Publisher: Virago
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1405526890

BY THE AUTHOR SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE INTRODUCED BY POLLY DEVLIN 'Psychologically sharp, socially knowing and closely knit' IRISH TIMES 'She was . . . marvellous' GUARDIAN 'A writer of genius' WALL STREET JOURNAL One glorious gothic mansion - Garonlea - and two rather different ladies who would be Queen . . . Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with a rod of iron until the arrival of Cynthia: beautiful, young, talented, selfish - and engaged to her son Desmond. When Cynthia enters the Jazz Age, on the surface her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.