Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland

Download or read book Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland written by Marie-Louise Coolahan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676. This was a tumultuous period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power struggles of early modern Ireland. This study brings to light the ways in which women contributed; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways andengaging with native and new language-traditions. The book investigates the genres in which women wrote: poetry, nuns' writing, petition-letters, depositions, biography and autobiography. It argues for a complex understanding of authorial agency that centres of the act of creating or composing atext, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. The Irish, English, and European contexts for women's production of texts are identified and assessed. The literary traditions and languages of the different communities living on the island are juxtaposed in order to show how identities were shaped and defined in relation to each other. Marie-Louise Coolahan elucidates the social, political, and economic imperatives for women's writing, examines the ways in which womencharacterized female composition, and describes an extensive range of cross-cultural, multilingual activity.