Eavan Boland and the Politics of Authority in Irish Poetry

Author: Clutterbuck Catriona¹

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

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