Alternative Ulsters: troubles short fiction by women writers, 1968-1998

• Main Author: del Campo del Pozo, Mercedes
• Published: Ulster University 2015
• Subjects: 823.009
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.676525

The literature of the Troubles has nearly always been thought of in terms of male writing whilst female authors dealing with the same topic have been comparatively neglected by critics. With a focus on Troubles short fiction, this thesis aims to examine the literary and cultural significance of a group of women writers' responses to the Northern Irish conflict. The thesis explores (in chapter 1) why Northern Irish women writers have not gained the same widespread recognition as their male counterparts, how and to what degree their fictional treatment of the Troubles differs from that of male authors, and what are the attractions of the short story form for the female imagination in the context of the Troubles. The textual analysis of the short stories is informed by cultural materialist, Marxist and feminist theories and is theme-based, covering victimhood (chapter 2), intimidation (chapter 3), romances across the divide (chapter 4), paramilitarism (chapter 5), and political incarceration (chapter 6) as major topics. The analysis shows that women's Troubles short stories tend to be concerned with how political violence affects women at a private/domestic, psychological and material level. Through the use of a primarily realist aesthetics, these writers demythologise conventional constructs of gender and cultural myths ingrained in Northern Irish society. They also challenge hegemonic notions of the nation by integrating the domestic plot into the larger historical context of political violence. Northern Irish women writers of Troubles short fiction offer alternative female riented narratives of the conflict that oppose the dominant discourses coming from male authors and from male-dominated groups and institutions (police, military and paramilitary forces, government, political parties, and churches). This thesis concludes that these women writers have rewritten the Troubles by paying more attention to private histories that highlight the quotidian, the domestic, the personal and the feminine than to a public History that has mainly centred on the doings of men and the binaries of colonialism and anti-colonialism.