Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Daniela Theinová LIMITS AND LANGUAGES in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry "Irish poetry" is an inherently equivocal concept characterized by two fissures, one linguistic (Irish-English; standard English-Hiberno English) and the other chronological (oral-written; Old Irish-modern Irish). Central to my project is to show how this bifurcate cultural identity, prominent in Irish literature due to Ireland's history and the politicized concept of "national language," figures in poetry by Irish women of the last forty years. While I account for the significance of the hyphen in Anglo-Irish as well as in Gaelic-Irish poets, contradictory tensions are traced not only across and along the linguistic divide. In attending to the shift from feminism (Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill) to post-feminism in Irish poetry (Biddy Jenkinson, Vona Groarke, Caitríona O'Reilly, and Aifric Mac Aodha), I illustrate the role that the border between English and Irish has played in these processes. The dissertation falls into two parts each of which consists of two chapters. Part One explores some of the ways in which poets have confronted the inherited tradition and the feminine stereotypes therein. My...