Irish Women's Prison Writing

This book explores 50 years of Irish womens prison writing, 1960s2010s, connecting the work of women leaders and writers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This volume analyzes political communiqus, petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs, highlighting the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairad Farrell, Sle Darragh, Ella ODwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey (formerly Marian Price), ine and Eibhln Nic Giolla Easpaig (Ann and Eileen Gillespie), Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta DArcy. This text builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. Centering Irish womens prison writings, in order to challenge canonization in history and literature, this volume argues that womens lives and words offer a different view of gender and nation as well as offer a fuller and more inclusive archive of Irish history and literature. Additionally, this book will point to the ways in which their politics of everyday life and their cultural work is a form of anti-colonial civil rights feminism, for it speaks truth to power in a world in which compliance and silence are valued. Overall, this text focuses on rethinking and recasting womens voices and words in order to document and promote the ongoing Irish freedom struggle from an abolitionist feminist perspective.