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Imperfectly Silent: Navigating the Unspoken in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing
McCormack, Madeline
McCormack, Madeline
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2025-12-18
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Abstract
The following paper seeks to answer the question of how do Irish women authors engage with the historical violences inflicted on Irish women and lasting legacies of trauma in the post-Celtic Tiger era to counteract deeply engrained social silences. Inspired by Kevin Quashie's theory of "Black aliveness", I argue that Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, and Caitriona Lally in their respective writings Small Things Like These, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and Eggshells represent the relation of being in their texts to assert the quality of aliveness possessed by Irish women in spite of legacies of abuse informed by patriarchal violence.