Eavan Boland and the Politics of Authority in Irish Poetry

Author: Clutterbuck Catriona

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 35, Number 1, 1 January 2005 , pp. 72-90(19)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract:

This article examines Eavan Boland's interrogation of the artist's necessary dilemma of representative authority in recovering the voice of the Other from outside to inside history. It argues that through this interrogation, Boland's work challenges a national literary tradition in equivocal wedlock to ideals of comprehensive representation of marginalized experience, specifically in the context of the ongoing debate on gender. The article explores how, for Boland, restriction in the poet's experience of her subject enters into relationship with the character of constraint or subalternity in that same material, to produce rather than exclude the potential for vision of that experience.

Keywords: Eavan Boland; authority; gender; subalternity

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University College Dublin

Publication date: 2005-01-01

More about this publication?

A supplement to the Modern Language Review, this journal includes articles and reviews on the language and literature of the English-speaking world. Most of the volumes published so far are 'Special Numbers', collections of between fifteen and eighteen commissioned articles on particular topics, such as the impact of the French Revolution on English writers; literature in the modern media; and colonial and imperial themes in literature.