Kate O'Brien was one of Ireland's best female writers; moreover, she was one of the first to centre on the Catholic Middle Class in her writing, as this class was long neglected. O'Brien was famous for her women-oriented books in which she portrayed the lives of women of the rising bourgeoisie of Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We can trace a certain development in O'Brien's writing, throughout her career she becomes more radical and comes to voice feminist notions about women being equal to men as well women's seeking independence from the world dominated by men. Most of her novels are family-oriented and may be called Bildungsromans as the protagonists, which apart from two books are all female, develop and grow to maturity and learn to understand the world and their place in it. As this thesis examined how the women in O'Brien's novels reflect the situation of women in her home country, it is apparent that throughout her life the writer became more radical and sceptical towards the fate of women in Ireland. Therefore, in her first written pieces she portrays women in their traditional roles as dutiful wives, daughters, or mothers. It is only in her later writing that the women manage to emancipate themselves and lead their lives independently. In O'Brien's first two...

Because the first part of the twentieth century in Ireland was marked with nationalist milestones like the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, most accounts of modern Irish literature and culture are nation-centered. This dissertation offers a new understanding of modern Irish writing by placing national identity in conversation with global consciousness, a burgeoning concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project explores three aspects of globalism: the attachments to foreign countries that Irish writers form; the ways in which these attachments affect their relationships with Ireland; and their subsequent articulation of global consciousness based on these transnational experiences. The introduction provides a critical and historical context for the project by negotiating between the established discipline of Irish Studies and the emerging field of Irish Diaspora Studies. Each chapter then investigates an Irish writer whose work indicates a relationship between global and national consciousness. The Irish-Argentine writer William Bulfin and the evolution of his relationship with gauchos, as it is suggested in his Tales of the Pampas, forms the subject of the next chapter. The second chapter juxtaposes Helen Waddell's The Princess Splendour and Other Stories, which retells fairytales from the Middle and Far East as well as from Ireland, with Lady Gregory's and Douglas Hyde's nationalistic collections of Irish folklore. The third chapter investigates the connection between the feminist underpinnings of Kate O'Brien's novels with the transnational movements that frequently accompany them. The fourth chapter examines the cosmopolitan imperative of Brian Moore's Irish-American novels. Finally, in the epilogue I briefly suggest the ways in which contemporary Irish writing extends the projects begun by these earlier figures.

This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.

My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity. / text