Too Smart to Be Sentimental

by Ebest, Sally Barr

• ISBN13: 9780268027735
• ISBN10: 0268027730
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr

Summary

In a series of critical and biographical essays, Too Smart to Be Sentimental offers a feminist literary history of twentieth-century Irish America. This collection introduces the reader to the works of twelve contemporary Irish American women writers, some of whom are well known, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice McDermott, and Tess Gallagher, and some of whom are equally deserving of recognition.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Writing Green Thoughts	p. 1
Women in Irish American Society
Mary McCarthy: Too Smart to Be Sentimental	p. 27
Maureen Howard's "Landscapes of Memory"	p. 52
Moments of Kindness, Moments of Recognition: The Achievement of Maeve Brennan	p. 81
Religion and Ethics
"Forget about Being Irish": Family, Transgression, and Identity in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan	p. 97
Alice McDermott's Narrators	p. 116
Oral Traditions
Tess Gallagher: A Network of Sympathies and Distant Connections	p. 139
"I'm Your Man": Irish American Masculinity in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates	p. 157
Sexuality
Hardly Sentimental: The "Bad Girls" and Lonely Men of Mary McGarry Morris's Fiction	p. 171
Blurring Boundaries: Eileen Myles and the Irish American Identity	p. 189
Feminism, Culture, and Critique
The World of Mary Gordon: Writing from the "Other Side"	p. 201
Jean McGarry: Sojourners Between Dreams and Realities	p. 220
Erin McGraw: Expanding the Tradition of Irish American Women Writers	p. 233
About the Contributors	p. 248
Index	p. 251
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