Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (2023) by Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston

Abstract

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston’s Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health combines archival research with incisive textual analysis to examine how topics such as sex, fertility, contraception, hygiene, and eugenics were circulated in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Reading medical case studies and newspaper articles alongside literary works by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O’Brien, and Brian O’Nolan, Houston’s book is a remarkable history of sexual politics and sexual rhetoric in Irish public life.

Keywords

• Irish modernism
• venereal diseases
• sexual modernism
• Flann O'Brien
• biopolitics
• censorship