Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

Edinburgh University Press (2025)

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland.

Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

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Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture, University of Manchester

Naoise Murphy is working on lesbian and transmasculine visibility in twentieth-century English fiction. Naoise has previously taught at the University of Oxford and Maynooth University. Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns is their first book.

More about Naoise Murphy

Lecturer (Teaching) in Gender and Sexuality Studies at UCL SELCS-CMII

I’m currently working on feminist and queer contemporary art practices, and how they challenge academic discourse of depoliticization in post-June 2013 Brazil. My research interests include decolonial approaches to gender and sexuality and perceptions of Brazilian and wider Latin American cultures and politics.

More about Juliana Demartini Brito

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