[DOWNLOAD] "Otherworldly Women and Neurotic Fairies: The Cultural Construction of Women in Angela Bourke's Writing." by Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Otherworldly Women and Neurotic Fairies: The Cultural Construction of Women in Angela Bourke's Writing.
- Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 405 KB
Description
This essay is concerned with the relationship between stories and social reality in Angela Bourke's writing. Bourke has written a short story collection entitled By Salt Water and is an academic working on subjects related to Irish folklore and the mythological tradition. (1) I will analyse the interconnections between Bourke's work as a cultural historian and as an author of short stories in order to show that her assessment of the social value and disciplining effects of narratives emphasizes the way in which physical bodies and landscapes are imbricated with a community's body-social or official body politic. This will allow me to explore how the corpuses drawn upon in narratives, such as those of the folk and fairy-tale tradition, but also those derived from Enlightenment myths, discipline audiences while at the same time legitimating the social order and dictating patterns of socialization. In The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999), Bourke investigates to what extent the events of the social world are scripted through stories derived from myths and folk-tales 'by disentangling the various strands of narrative which survive about the death of Bridget Cleary.' (2) An important focus of her study is the relationship between women's bodies and nature represented in Irish folk-tales and in metropolitan and nationalist discourses derived from Enlightenment myths. We may regard these three kinds of discourses as major undercurrents shaping feminine identity in nineteenth-century Irish culture. Their echoes are explored by many Irish writers concerned with the constructions of women's social personae. (3)