'It’s a phenomenon - we’re very privileged’: Contemporary Irish women writers celebrated at symposium in Mexico

Description

Irish studies programme in Mexico has introduced students to writers such as Sally Rooney and Claire Keegan

Subject

To open the symposium, UCC’s Professor of Modern English, Dr Claire Connolly, delivered a lecture titled Irish Women’s Writing from Maria Edgeworth to Sally Rooney: A Motherless History? Connolly paired an early 19th century writer with an early 21st century writer “because in Ireland we have these grave and acknowledged difficulties of creating a kind of meaningful history of Irish women’s writing over the centuries”.

“There’s a huge interest in [Rooney’s] work, so there is a big focus on that,” says Connolly, “but also on the idea of a literary history characterised by the cleavages of colonialism and class and the ruptures of famine and mass migration”.

“The great achievements of the past continue to feed student interest – not just academics who want to do research, but students who are buying work by contemporary [Irish] women and reading it and thinking about it and studying it to the extent that it feeds Irish studies as a discipline,” says Connolly. “It’s a phenomenon – we’re very privileged.”