Anglo-Irish modernism and the maternal: from Yeats to Joyce

Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists.

Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists - Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats and O'Casey - resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her.

In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured their own creative selves.