Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O'Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history - the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act - were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism's engagement with sex, health, and the body.

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O'Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history - the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act - were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism's engagement with sex, health, and the body.

This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite women’, and the involvement of women in the Irish nationalist/revolutionary period. Envisioned to be both thematic and chronological, the book provides insight into the comparative, transnational, and connected histories of Ireland, India, and the British empire. An important contribution to the study of Irish gender history, the volume offers opportunities for students and researchers to learn from the methods and historiography of Irish studies. It will be useful for scholars and teachers of history, gender studies, colonialism, post-colonialism, European history, Irish history, Irish studies, and political history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Gregory Dobbins argues that the cultural politics of Irish modernism lie precisely in its engagement with the concept of idleness.

This book attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns.

Impure thoughts is the first study of the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role in Irish culture. With chapters on James Joyce and Kate O’Brien, along with studies of Maura Laverty, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien and John McGahern, this book offers a fresh new approach to the study of twentieth-century Irish writing and of the twentieth-century novel. Combining the study of literature and of archival material, Impure thoughts also develops a new interpretive framework for studying the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland. Addressing itself to a wide set of interdisciplinary questions about Irish sexuality, modernity and post-colonial development, as well as Irish literature, it will be of interest to students and scholars in various disciplines, including literary studies, history, sociology and gender studies.