“It Was a Smoke Dream”: Affective Aesthetics in Women’s Literature of the Irish Civil War

Abstract

The formal, ideological, and narrative elements constituting the aesthetics of hope and disappointment in women’s writing of the Irish revolution offer new insights into the gendered experience of conflict. By arguing that women’s writing in this period complicates and expands existing classifications of conflict literature, this paper proposes to trace a network of alternative connection, built out of subjective gendered experiences of political and social upheaval. Drawing on theories of affect and emotion with reference to Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House (1938), Margaret Barrington’s My Cousin Justin (1939) and Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited (1942), this article suggests that appraisal of textual interconnection can thicken our understanding of the conceptual tools engaged by women writers to record, relay, and refract the personal and political implications of early-twentieth century Ireland.

Keywords

• feminist writing
• conflict literature
• affect theory
• Irish fiction