Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

336 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-288949-2 (ISBN)

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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.

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston is SSHRC-CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Alberta and Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Their research explores the cultural politics of sexual health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has been featured in publications including the Review of English Studies, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and the Irish Times.

Introduction: Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health
Part I: Scandalous Autonomy
1: 'Bred out of the contagion of the throng': Irish Modernism, Sexual Health, and the Parnell Myth
2: 'Survival of the unfittest': Synge, Yeats, and the Rhetoric of Health
Part II: Hygiene and its Discontents
3: 'Their syphilisation you mean': Irish Modernism and the Politics of Venereal Disease
Part III: Heredity and Fertility
4: 'Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter': Beckett, Censorship, and Fertility
5: 'But perhaps this new child will be perfect!': Kate O'Brien's Eugenic Romances
Part IV: Sexual Health and Exhaustion
6: 'Veni, V.D., Vici!': Flann O'Brien, Sexual Health, and the Exhaustion of Irish Modernism

Erscheinungsdatum	17.05.2023
Reihe/Serie	Oxford English Monographs
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	145 x 222 mm
Gewicht	514 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-288949-4 / 0192889494
ISBN-13	978-0-19-288949-2 / 9780192889492
Zustand	Neuware