Changing Ireland

"The last three decades have witnessed an explosion of women's writing in Ireland. During these few years hundreds of novels and short-story collections have appeared, works that have invented a new Ireland - on both sides of the border - and a new place for women in it. Changing Ireland explores just this: a fractured people re-imagining itself in the minds of gifted women. The first book to address an extraordinary achievement, this study examines the recent fiction within its social contexts, alert to the historical and political realities from which it emerges. The seven chapters that comprise Changing Ireland look at women's strategic reworkings of such inherited genres as exilic writing, historical fiction, war literature of the North, Bildung novels, fictionalized memoirs, speculative fiction and classic realism. The also consider the local shapes Irish women are giving to the international 'women's' blockbuster and to feminist fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.