About the Book
Since the 1980s, there has been an unprecedented and unremitting rise in the number of women writers in Galicia and Ireland. Publishers, critics, journals, and women’s groups have played a decisive role in this phenomenon. Creation, Publishing, and Criticism provides a plurality of perspectives on the strategies deployed by the various cultural agents in the face of the advance of women authors and brings together a selection of articles by writers, publishers, critics, and theatre professionals who delve into their experiences during this process of cultural change. This collection of essays sets out to show how, departing from comparable circumstances, the Galician and the Irish literary systems explore their respective new paths in ways that are pertinent to each other. This book will be of particular interest to students of Galician and Irish studies, comparative literature, women’s studies, and literary criticism. Both specialists in cultural analysis and the common reader will find this an enlightening book.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Luz Pozo Garza: Preface – María Xesús Nogueira/Laura Lojo/Manuela Palacios: Writers, Publishers, and Critics in Galicia and Ireland: an entente cordiale? – Fran Alonso: Women, Poetry, and Publishing – Jessie Lendennie: Irish Women Poets in a Changing Society – Susan Connolly: Coming out of the Forest (Making the Journey from First to Second Collection) – María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar: Critical Styles: Some Notes on the Functions of Galician Feminist Criticism – Marilar Aleixandre: Unexplored Territories: Criticism and Writing by Women – Irene Gilsenan Nordin: Poetry and Education: The Role of the Literary Critic in Academia – Mercedes Queixas Zas: Galician Fiction: A Genre with Gender? – Francisco Castro: Of Value on Their Own. Literature by Women and Galician Publishing – Paz Castro: Women in Children’s Literature Today: A First-Person Account – Declan Meade: Irish Women Writers: Forging Ahead – Paula Campbell: The City Girls – Helena Miguélez-Carballeira: Of Nouns and Adjectives: Women’s Fiction and Literary Criticism in Galicia – Ramón Nicolás: Women Fiction Writers in a Critic’s View – Kerry Hardie: A Writer’s Thoughts on Publication and Public Criticism – Cristina Domínguez: Creating Theatre Today: Our Necessary Identity – Ánxeles Cuña Bóveda: Margar in the Halls of Time and Give Me Poison ... I Too Dream – Colette Connor: Irish Women Playwrights: Undervalued and Overmined – Ursula Rani Sarma: Transcending Categories: Thoughts on Being a Playwright and Responding to Expectation – Roberto Pascual Rodríguez: On the Lamentable Effect of Criticism on the Irregular Situation of Galician Drama Written by Women – Celia de Fréine: Women Playwrights, Whither? – Mary O’Donnell: Irish Women’s Drama: Questions of Response and Location.
About the Author :
María Xesús Nogueira has a Ph.D. in Galician literature and works as an Associate Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She has specialized in Álvaro Cunqueiro’s fiction, contemporary poetry, and women’s writing. Nogueira is the author of Soñadores e famila. Os personaxes na narrativa de Cunqueiro (2009), Álvaro Cunqueiro. Narrativa curta. Antoloxía (1997), and Os outros feirantes de Álvaro Cunqueiro (1993). She was a contributor to Historia da literatura galega (1997) and A Literatura desde 1936 ata hoxe: poesía e teatro (2001). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Grial, Anuario de Estudos Literarios Galegos, and Boletín Galego de Literatura, and she has collaborated with Consello da Cultura, A Nosa Terra, and Radio Galega.
Laura Lojo is Associate Professor of English literature and language at the University of Santiago de Compostela and has a Ph.D. in Virginia Woolf’s writing. Lojo is the author of Introduction to Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction (2003), and is co-editor of Writing Bonds: Irish and Galician Contemporary Women Poets (2009). She has also published book chapters and articles in literary journals on various topics, such as the reception of British modernism in Spanish-speaking countries, Irish women’s poetry, women’s studies, and comparative literature.
Manuela Palacios is Associate Professor of English at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Modernist literature and the visual arts. She has directed two research projects on contemporary Irish and Galician women writers that have been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and she has co-edited two books on this topic: Palabras extremas (2008) and Writing Bonds (2009). Her other publications include translations of European poetry and narrative, monographs on Virginia Woolf’s pictorial imagery, Shakespeare’s Richard III, and articles on ecocriticism.
Review :
«This innovative and challenging collection of essays opens up fresh perspectives on the recent history, production, and reception of Galician and Irish women’s writing. ‘Creation, Publishing, and Criticism’ explores the common heritage of these Celtic cultures, but also richly documents the often radically different experiences of women writers in both countries and the varying responses they have elicited. By canvassing the viewpoints of contemporary writers, critics, publishers, and theatre directors, it assembles a lively forum of divergent attitudes to artistic practices and policies and provides an invaluable insight into the current cultural moment. The wide-ranging and combative interventions in this volume attest to the richness of the work by contemporary Galician and Irish women writers, while also underscoring the continuing difficulty of fostering feminist criticism and of finding a public outlet for women’s expression, especially in the domain of theatre.» (Professor Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin)
«This pioneering collection of essays sets a new bar, not just for the study of women’s writing in two small Atlantic cultures, but, more broadly, for our awareness of the range of strategies by which cultural agents have conditioned the production and reception of works by women. Bringing together the voices of writers, critics, publishers, theatre directors, and journalists, it is a rich, vital, and challenging intervention that opens up a new space for reflection not only on the way things are and why, but on how they might be otherwise.» (Dr Kirsty Hooper, University of Liverpool)
