
Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín: 44 New Edition
Author(s): Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (Author)
- Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
- Publication Date: 30 Jan. 2012
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 247 pages
- ISBN-10: 3034307535
- ISBN-13: 9783034307536
Book Description
This original and engaging study explores the way in which Colm Tóibín repeatedly identifies and disrupts the boundaries between personal and political or social histories in his fiction. Through this collapsing of boundaries, he examines the cost of broader political exclusions and considers how personal and political narratives shape individual subjects.
Each of Tóibín’s novels is comprehensively addressed here, as are his non-fiction works, reviews, plays, short stories, and some as-yet-unpublished work. The book situates Tóibín not only within his contemporary literary milieu, but also within the contexts of the Irish literary tradition, contemporary Irish politics, Irish nationalism, and theories of psychology, gender, nationalism, and postcolonialism.
Each of Tóibín’s novels is comprehensively addressed here, as are his non-fiction works, reviews, plays, short stories, and some as-yet-unpublished work. The book situates Tóibín not only within his contemporary literary milieu, but also within the contexts of the Irish literary tradition, contemporary Irish politics, Irish nationalism, and theories of psychology, gender, nationalism, and postcolonialism.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Costello-Sullivan’s meticulous research and extensive bibliography will be valuable to any scholar studying Tóibín’s writing, and her thought-provoking interpretations of his novels will generate lively critical discussions. (Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt, New Hibernia Review 17, 2013/3)
Much work has been done by feminists working in Irish Studies, by scholars exploring LGBTQ literary and cultural studies in the Irish context […]; Mother/Country is, to my knowledge, the most probing and developed such exploration to date.
(Margot Backus, Irish Literary Supplement 2016)
About the Author
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Modern Irish Literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, USA, where she founded and directs an Irish Literature minor. She has published widely on Anglo-Irish and Irish authors, including Jonathan Swift, Somerville and Ross, Maria Edgeworth, Emily Lawless, and Colm Tóibín, and her critical edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is forthcoming.
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