Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T10:41:35.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 15 - Animals and Animality in Irish Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2022

Malcolm Sen
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Get access

Summary

This chapter charts a transhistorical narrative to analyze the evolving permutations encoded within human–animal binarisms. Maureen O’Connor argues that “The native Irish were long believed to have powers of human–animal metamorphosis.” O’Connor states that the Welsh clergyman Giraldus Cambrensis, and later Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland, “claimed that the Irish regularly turned into wolves.” Interestingly, in the late nineteenth century “various threats to the status quo, including feminists and Fenians, were figured as werewolves. Following the Great Hunger and the subsequent rise of Fenianism, which agitated for Irish independence often through acts of violent terror, the image of the threatening Irish animal became ubiquitous in English culture.” O’Connor is especially alert to the gendered dimensions to such discourses, making visible the transformation of the dyadic relationship between animality and femininity that stretches from early Irish writing to colonial and postcolonial deployments.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×