Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Ellen McWilliams is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009) and has received a number of awards for research, including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship (2011) and a Fulbright Scholar Award (2012).

• Acknowledgements Introduction  1. Women, Forms of Exile, and Diasporic Identities  2. 'Outside History': Exile and Myths of the Irish Feminine in Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men and The Irish Signorina   3. Negotiating with the Motherland: Exile and the Irish Woman Writer in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy and The Light of Evening   4. Relative Visibility: Women, Exile, and Censorship in John McGahern's The Leavetaking and Amongst Women   5. Architectures of Exile and Self-Exile in William Trevor's Felicia's Journey and The Story of Lucy Gault   6. The Refusenik Returnee and Reluctant Emigrant in Colm Tóibín's The South and Brooklyn   7. 'Ireland is Something That Often Happens Elsewhere': Displaced and Disrupted Histories in Anne Enright's What Are You Like? and The Gathering Afterword Bibliography Index

“As her study, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, amply shows, women are no longer marginal characters but protagonists who provide rich commentary on emigration-related social concerns including reproductive rights, censorship, religious and class identities, whiteness, and belonging. … The book is engagingly written and constitutes a compelling and important contribution to contemporary Irish literary criticism.” (Katrin Urschel, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 39 (2), 2016)