Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre

Shonagh Hill teaches at University College Dublin. She was awarded an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship 2016–17 (University College Dublin) to develop her monograph Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre. Hill has published articles on women and Irish theatre in a range of leading journals and internationally reviewed books. Most recently, 'Feeling Out of Place: The 'affective dissonance' of the feminist spectator in The Boys of Foley Street' was published in Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (2017).

• Introduction: a creative female corporeality; 1. Revolutionary bodies: mythmaking and Irish feminisms; 2. Unhomely bodies: transforming space; 3. Process and resistance: metamorphic 'bodies that matter'; 4. Staging female death: sacrificial and dying bodies; 5. Haunted bodies and violent pasts; 6. Olwen Fouéré's Corpus: the performer's body and her body of work.

'Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre is an accessible and timely feminist intervention into canonical, patriarchal myth-making on the twenty and twenty-first century Irish stages. Turning her feminist gaze on Irish theatre, Hill persuasively argues that is not enough merely to uncover the histories of missing or marginalised women theatre makers and to reposition these within the canonical, patriarchal set-up. Her innovative, critical manoeuvre is to offer a genealogical framework that disavows a conventional, chronological method; what readers of her study will discover is a retelling of the Irish stage through a non-linear approach that forges links between different sites, modes, or moments of women's resistant theatre-making. This is a narrative in which the leading protagonists are not the patriarchally agreed canonical suspects, but the unruly bodies of those theatre women who contest and rebel against the limiting myths of femininity.' Elaine Aston, Lancaster University