Feminine Nation: Performance, Gender and Resistance in the Works of John McGahern and Neil Jordan

This book examines two prominent Irish authors, Neil Jordan and John McGahern. Jordan is famous for his films, most notably The Crying Game, and this work studies both his films and his fiction. McGahern is the most respected, lauded Irish novelist since Joyce; a writer who broke the mold of Anglo-Irish writing after it settled into a conservative rut in the 1950s. The works of Jordan and McGahern, involved with seemingly minor issues of householding and parenting within the patriarchal family, reveal male and female characters to be representations of a masculine past and feminine present competing for dominance in the modern state. The author argues that in Jordan’s and McGahern’s works the modern state is described as stereotypically feminine, and that women’s individual agency is directed to the deliberate blurring of gender difference upon which patriarchy depends. The first book-length study of the contemporary Anglo-Irish novel written from a women’s studies and a post-colonial perspective, Feminine Nation will be of considerable interest to a large audience composed of Women’s Studies, Irish Studies, and Post-Colonial studies.