‘Edna O’Brien’s Narratives of Self-Fashioning’ begins by noting that even though Edna O’Brien had been publishing novels and receiving considerable public attention since the appearance of her Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), scholarship on her work only appeared belatedly, starting in the 1990s. The originality of these early novels lay in the frankness with which they addressed sexuality and gender-based violence and oppression in Ireland. Later works, such as A Pagan Place (1970), moved to more experimental forms of writing, and this in turn has opened up ecocritical modes of reading O’Brien’s work, in which the natural world and the human world are intimately connected. In this respect, that early Trilogy provides a template for reading much of O’Brien’s later work, even as she continued to write well into the twenty-first century, insofar as it contains the element of ‘making contact’ that O’Brien identified as the impetus behind her earliest writing.

‘Irish Fiction and Gender in the Long Twenty-First Century’ begins by observing that fiction by Irish women is in a position of unprecedented authority, and is winning critical and commercial success on a scale never seen before. Referencing Anna Burns, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, and others, the chapter also explores Edna O’Brien’s novel Wild Decembers (1999) and Soula Emmanuel’s Wild Geese (2023). It is argued that between these two novels, we can trace not only changes in Irish society but also some of the ways in which gender is produced and defined by social context. It extends this analysis to a range of twenty-first-century novels, including Mary Costello’s The River Capture (2019) and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021). Although these novels deploy a range of fictional techniques, it is noted that there is a recurrence of modernist forms, which the author refers to as a ‘stubborn modernism’.

This introduction situates the rebellions in British Guiana within the larger context of unrest in the Caribbean during the 1930s. I also discuss the concepts of solidarity, overlapping diasporas, and modern politics to explore how this story fits into the broader historiography, and why the stakes of this project have implications both within and beyond the region.

‘Contemporary Irish Popular Fiction’ considers a genre of writing sometimes characterised as ‘chick-lit’ (a disputed term), women’s fiction (equally problematical), or popular women’s fiction, which now constitutes one of the largest and fastest-growing genres of Irish writing. Beginning with the emergence of Maeve Binchy as an internationally successful novelist in the 1990s, a succession of Irish writers – Patricia Scanlan, Cecelia Ahern, Sinéad Moriarty, Marian Keyes, Emer McLysaght, and Sarah Breen – have produced work that has not only been hugely popular with readers, but which has also addressed key issues in contemporary Irish society, including abortion, divorce, gender roles, aging, and housing. It is demonstrated that the familiar tropes and situations deployed in novels in this genre allow scope to address these issues. Ultimately, it is argued, this genre of popular fiction has been among the most successful in addressing the changing nature of Irish society.

This chapter explores feminist International Relations (IR) theory and its application to the Middle East, demonstrating how gendered power dynamics shape the region's international politics. Feminist IR challenges traditional IR theories by foregrounding gender as a fundamental category of analysis, revealing how hierarchical constructions of masculinity and femininity underpin state behaviour, security policies, and other global processes. The chapter examines key strands of feminist IR, including liberal, critical, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer feminist theories, emphasising their respective contributions to understanding the significance of gender, as well as race and sexuality, in global politics. Through a case study of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, still ongoing at the time of writing despite an announced ceasefire in October 2025, the chapter highlights the gendered dimensions of settler colonialism, militarism, and genocide. It interrogates how gendered and racialised discourses normalise violence and explores the war’s devastating impacts on women, social reproduction, and human security. The chapter critiques the complicity of colonial feminism in perpetuating oppression and underscores Palestinian women’s resistance. The chapter concludes by highlighting the role of feminist IR in offering pathways towards more just and inclusive international relations.

‘Irish Children’s Novels after 1960’ outlines the parallel development of children’s fiction in Ireland, and the rise of scholarship in the field. If we consider a novel such as Siobhan Dowd’s A Swift Pure Cry (2006), it is now apparent that one of the major shifts to have taken place in Irish children’s fiction in the final decades of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century, is in relation to gender. This is particularly true of novels of same-sex attraction, such as C. G. Moore’s Gut Feelings (2021). However, the groundwork for the current flourishing of Irish children’s fiction that addresses questions of gender can be found in novels such as Patricia Lynch’s Sally from Cork (1960). We can thus trace an increase in the number of children’s novels being published in Ireland over the period since 1960, as well as increased diversity of experiences of childhood and adolescence.

‘Lives and Adventures 2: Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ contrasts the situation of eighteenth-century novels by and about women, which introduced new forms of interiority to fiction, with those written by men, characterised by the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a ‘gentleman’ were dangerously unfixed. This produces literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque, notably Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Michael Clancy’s The Memoirs of Michael Clancy, M.D. (1750), or Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). These works both mark developments in the rise of the novel and, simultaneously, threaten to disrupt the novel’s nascent form. Equally, each of these works involves characters who are in some respect physically impaired, such as Clancy’s protagonist who goes blind, bringing the tale to an end.

This chapter is centered on a reading of Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar (1963). Locating that novel within its author’s confessional poetry this chapter describes the relationship between reproductive labor and the creative economy as framed by the capitalist world-system at a time of geopolitical and ideological contest with the socialist states. For Plath tragic affect is born from the convergence of creative and reproductive labor wherein both types of work are subject to a process of reification: the reification of human misery registering above all in the exhaustion of a lyric voice as it is buried under the weight of a commercially viable syntax. The chapter shows how Plath’s novel combines a pervasive mood of melancholy with critical self-reflection about creative labor wherein tragedy is ultimately displaced into the realm of affect.

A man to whom God grants that he may return will be greatly honoured in this world. Whoever has loved well in his country should preserve the memory of it wherever he goes. And may God allow me to enjoy the best lady, so that I might find her in life and health, when God has completed his business!

The concept of crusading is inextricably linked with men, both in medieval sources and in modern imaginations. The quote above, from an anonymous twelfth-century Anglo-Norman crusade recruitment song, extols the benefits gained by a returning crusader. It links crusading with the manly pursuit of honour, encouraging men to take the cross as a devotional sacrifice, leaving behind women and love. Returning to ‘the best lady’ was the crusader’s reward for completing ‘God’s business’. The idea that crusades were for men, and not for women, was probably widespread at the end of the twelfth century. Crusading had been conceived of and promoted by the medieval Church as a manly endeavour since the preaching of the First Crusade.

‘Sexuality and the Irish Novel’ situates the work of Irish writers addressing sexuality in Irish fiction after about 1960 in the context of the final years of literary censorship in the Irish Republic. Around the time of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), a series of novels, including J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley (1964), and later John McGahern’s The Pornographer (1979), combine explorations of sexuality with experiments in literary form. In the case of Anthony C. West’s The Ferret Fancier (1963) and Julia O’Faolain’s Women in the Wall (1975), the exploration of sexuality involves combining the historical novel with the Bildungsroman, while Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle (1977) strives for an embodied feminine consciousness. In each case, these novels explore sexual repression as a symptom not only of a postcolonial condition but also of the alienating tendencies of capitalist modernity.

This chapter applies an intersectional analysis to reconstruct the harshness of laborers’ daily lives in British Guiana, examining the dimensions of race, labor categories, age, and gender. Working women particularly felt the pangs of the economic downturn as they were pushed out of the plantation economy during this turbulent decade. The reader is transported into the challenging hydraulic environment of 1930s British Guiana to understand what it meant to be alive and work on plantations in that colony and in that period. I specifically discuss the aftermath of the great flood of 1934 that took place during the Great Depression and how that disaster exposed the failures of British modernity and unleashed a crisis-based solidarity.

‘Lives and Adventures 1: Irish Women and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ traces a line of development in fiction by Irish women, from the works of Mary Davys early in the century, which are concerned with identifying female agency in plot-structure through a variety of narrative strategies, to epistolary works of sensibility by mid century Irish women writers such as Frances Sheridan (1724–66) and Elizabeth Griffith (1727–93) where plot and form exist in tension, with the epistolatory form allowing women’s voices to speak through plots that would inhibit their agency. Through letter writing and the keeping of journals, and incorporating these elements into the novel, a new form of interiority emerges in eighteenth-century novels by Irish women. By the end of the century, the novels of Elizabeth Sheridan portray female lives of confidence and assertion by framing women’s lives in the context of an emerging nationalism.

‘Irish Novels of Precarious Self-Fashioning’ defines ‘self-fashioning’ as a mode of self-consciousness, a battle between ‘innate’ nature and the demands of social constructs; as such, the narrativising processes of the novel are ideally suited to the process of reimagining or remaking the self. This is made precarious for Irish writers not only by the challenges to a secure identity posed by the colonial condition but also by prescriptive social definitions of gender and nationality that extend beyond Ireland. A series of Irish novels from the late nineteenth century take these questions as their focus, including Emily Lawless’ Grania (1892), Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte (1894), and, perhaps most famously, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Less well known, but equally important in this regard, are Katherine Cecil Thurston’s novels, The Masquerader (1904) and Max (1910), the latter of which radically challenges heteronormativity.