Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal

From Yeats to Joyce

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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.