The Home and The World: Existence and Interrelationship in Post-2010 Irish Women's Writing

In the twenty-first century, particularly in the post-Celtic Tiger period (2008- ), with the drastic changes in Irish society and the remarkable growth in women’s political movements, Irish women writers, a historically overlooked group, have received unprecedented attention, exemplified by their award-winning works and their growing international reputations. Anchored in Ireland yet not limited to Irish society, contemporary Irish women’s writing addresses contemporary issues without being exclusively about them. Their work, which demonstrates a strong humanistic sensibility, profoundly explores human existence and interrelationship from multifaceted perspectives. Given the prominence of issues concerning existence, identity and interrelationality in modern cultural and philosophical theory, it is striking that there has not yet been a comprehensive analysis of how contemporary Irish women’s writing contributes to these topics. In concentrating on post-2010 Irish women’s writing, this thesis explores the literary texts of five contemporary Irish women authors from different generations, Edna O’Brien, Paula Meehan, Anne Enright, Sínead Morrissey, and Melatu Uche Okorie, who have contributed significantly to diverse literary genres: novels, poetry and short stories. It seeks to provide a glimpse into how Irish women’s writing, post-2010, represents and explores the themes of human existence and interrelationship, revealing the insights that can be gleaned through the critical analyses of their texts. Notably, existing studies on contemporary Irish women’s writing frequently focus on a single genre, primarily fiction. The cross-genre approach employed in this thesis provides a new and valuable way to examine the selected writers’ comparable aesthetic techniques, as well as their shared philosophical and ethical concerns. The renowned political philosopher and theorist Judith Butler’s biopolitical theories of precarity, grievability and interdependency, as well as geocritical theories of Homi K. Bhabha, Martin Heidegger, Jeff Malpas and Michel Foucault, provide the primary critical lenses through which the thesis analyses the selected authors’ exploration of human existence and interrelationship. In light of these theories, this thesis examines the chosen texts in different relational contexts, for instance, the relationship between human and nonhuman beings, among family members, between the individual and history, and between immigrants and host countries. An illuminating conceptual framework, which enables a deeper understanding of human existence and interrelationship, emerges from these critical analyses: that is, Being as Being-in, Being as Being-with and Being as Being-in-between.