Alex Pryce

This course looked at the relationship between creativity and the real as evidenced in works designated by the oxymoronic genre ‘creative nonfiction’. It considered 8 works published by women since 2003 and invited creative responses as part of assessment. Authors included Azar Nafisi, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jeanette Winterson,  Ali Smith, Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson.

This course considers the British novel in the contemporary period through close study of the  approaches taken by major figures in British fiction from the 1980s onwards. Including Kazuo Ishiguro, Iain Banks, Angela Carter, Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith.

Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request. This course focused on postmodern fiction by women writers in the contemporary period, with understanding aided by postmodern theory and reference to the women's movement. Includes fiction from Kathy Acker, Brigid Brophy, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Elvira Dones and Ali Smith.

Level 3 (undergraduate) course. Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request. This course focused on women’s writing in the twentieth century by considering the work of four seminal authors. Through close and extensive reading of works by Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien, the course considers female consciousness, autonomy, and sexuality, as well as how the role of woman writer has changed throughout the period. The authors on this course come from different cultural backgrounds, and engage with the twentieth century in diverse ways, utilising different strategies and approaches.

"Level 2 (undergraduate) course. Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request.

This course focused on critical movements, and considered how literary theory can provide stimulating ways of reading literary texts. There will be eight tutorials, and for each we will focus on a different topic/school/theorist. The course included New and Practical Criticism, The Author, Derrida and Deconstruction, Ideology and Power, Feminism(s), Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and Postmodernism."

Level 1 (undergraduate) course. Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request. This course invited students to think critically about issues at the core of all literary study. During the course, students were engaged in complex debates such as ‘What is literature? What do readers do? What, if anything, can literary texts tell us about gender, about history or about the society in which we live?’. This was undertaken by combining works of ‘literary theory’ with literary texts (poetry, short fiction, plays) by authors from a broad range of historical, cultural and social backgrounds. In attempting to answer these questions and through reading these texts, the course aimed to give students the confidence to debate these critical concepts and gain the essential skills required for studying literature.

""Level 2 (undergraduate) course. Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request. This course focused on the ‘British’ immigration novel in the contemporary (roughly post-1970) period. Through these novels, students can consider culture clash, class, history, diaspora, language, national identity, postcoloniality, religion, neighborhoods, education, community development, and the family. Ultimately, the course aim is to create awareness of how multi-cultural themes and multi-cultural writers have shaped the novel in the contemporary period.

There were eight tutorials and for each the focus was on one or two novels.
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"Level 2 (undergraduate) course. Primary, 8 week course. Reading list and course guide available on request.

This course focuses on women’s writing in the twentieth century by considering a variety of works including novels, biographies, essays, short fiction and poetry from the modernist to contemporary period. Through these diverse texts students can contemplate how the role of woman writer has changed as well as discuss the implications of the varying literary strategies deployed in their works. By considering women’s writing in this way we will be able to consider critical issues central to all literary study while giving their work the attention it is due.

There were eight tutorials and for each the focus was on a different woman writer and their work.
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This thesis seeks to argue for the problematising role of tradition and generational influence in the work of three Northern Irish poets publishing since the late 1990s. The subjects, Colette Bryce (b. 1970), Leontia Flynn (b. 1974) and Sinead Morrissey (b. 1972), emerged coterminously, each publishing with major UK publishers. Together they represent a generation of assured female poetic voices. This study presents one of the first critical considerations of the work of these poets, and it remains conscious of the dominance of conceptions of tradition and lineage which are notable in poetry from Northern Ireland from the twentieth-century onwards. In suggesting that this tradition is problematised for emerging women poets by precursor-peer dominance and the primacy of male perspectives in the tradition, this thesis combines a study of poetics, themes relating to gender, detachment and paratexts. From consideration of these elements, it proposes that contemporary poets are not neces...

This thesis seeks to argue for the problematising role of tradition and generational influence in the work of three Northern Irish poets publishing since the late 1990s. The subjects, Colette Bryce (b. 1970), Leontia Flynn (b. 1974) and Sinéad Morrissey (b. 1972), emerged coterminously, each publishing with major UK publishers. Together they represent a generation of assured female poetic voices. This study presents one of the first critical considerations of the work of these poets, and it remains conscious of the dominance of conceptions of tradition and lineage which are notable in poetry from Northern Ireland from the twentieth-century onwards. In suggesting that this tradition is problematised for emerging women poets by precursor-peer dominance and the primacy of male perspectives in the tradition, this thesis combines a study of poetics, themes relating to gender, detachment and paratexts. From consideration of these elements, it proposes that contemporary poets are not necessarily subject to the powers of tradition and influence, but rather, are capable of a selective approach that in turn demonstrates the malleability of contemporary traditions.

The approaches are laid out in four chapters which move from a consideration of “threshold” paratexts (following from the work of Gérard Genette), including book reviews and dedications, through studies of thematic divergence and detachment, the changing status of women’s poetry traditions within Northern Ireland and beyond, the significance of gendered subjects in poetry, and influence found not in thematic or paratextual aspects, but in the individual aspects of poetic form. These aspects combine to form poems and the tradition(s) in which they continue. The thesis provides extensive coverage of the work of Bryce, Flynn, and Morrissey, combining close readings with the application of theoretical frameworks interrogating the implications of literary traditions on later writers (especially when the writers are temporally and culturally close), giving particular consideration to gender and feminist politics. It explores a variety of different critical truisms applied to the poetic generations that precede the younger poets and identifies both compliance and divergences from the contemporary Northern Irish canon. In doing so, this study simultaneously illuminates the frailties of the popular, overwhelmingly male, tradition, particularly as regards to representations of women, and provides direction for studies of post-millennial Northern Irish poetry.

Alex Pryce considers how writers are readers, influenced and inspired by the works of other writers. Taking as a starting point the literary afterlife of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and the influence of Romantic John Keats on the First World War Poet Wilfred Owen, Alex discusses how writers are challenged by precursory writers, and introduces some theories of influence from T.S. Eliot and Harold Bloom.

Book reviews remain important to authors, publishers, booksellers, peers, academics and general readers. They may shape what gets published, what stays in print, and what or who does not. If reviews are important, then it is also important to consider the health of reviewing culture. Thus, this paper will consider the current feminist book reviewing culture by interrogating reviews found in journals such as Feminist Review and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and feminist blogs and websites such as The F Word and For Book’s Sake.

Both outlets present opportunities for engagement with texts by women and about women’s issues. Yet, there are often quite different value judgments made about the usefulness and validity of their reviews. This paper will consider several important facets of journal and online reviewing culture, including the kind of texts under discussion (and available for discussion), the contributors submitting, frequency of publication, content, style and register of reviews, and potential audience. It is my contention that there are similarities, for example in the backgrounds of contributors and readers, and that there are differences, in immediacy, register, and critical rigour.

It is important to reflect on these issues because these two mediums of circulation are central to the formation of critical hierarchies for texts in the 21st century. In forming these, they may further help to establish the importance of these texts in future years.  In addition, within the academy it is worth considering the future of our own reviewing culture in austere times. We might speculate on reductions to print journal circulation or changes to their online availability. There may be reduced opportunities for journal publication within a competitive job market or fewer texts published suitable for review. The existing online feminist reviewing culture presents a model of digital activism for the humanities to engage with and follow.

This paper will consider the political wrangling played out in some ‘paratexts’ which are key to our understanding of contemporary Northern Irish poetry. In using the term ‘paratext’, I will draw primarily on the ideas of Gerard Genette who first surveyed and explained the use of features such as dedications and epigraphs in his 1997 work Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. These paratexts are on the threshold of the text proper and play a part in our appreciation of it by their often implicit meanings and the reader’s conditioned understanding of them. Further, they are of interest when considering recent Northern Irish work because their prevalence is an ostentatious display of the flourishing tradition’s continued dominance.

Dedicatory ‘networks’ have been a noticeable feature in Northern Irish poetry during the late 20th-century, often indicating friendships or artistic kinship between writers such as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. Epigraphs, meanwhile, often recall the greatness of precursory writers and emphasize their continuing high renown. As a younger generation of writers emerges in the 21st-century there are now new issues of a more political nature to consider. How, for example, does dedication and epigraphy signify anxieties of influence while paradoxically reinforcing canonicity?

Further, by surveying the use of dedication and epigraphs in the work of younger poets Colette Bryce, Sinead Morrissey, Jean Bleakney, Leontia Flynn and Kerry Hardie, this paper will address how a politics of gender may potentially transform the existing dedicatory network, and inform a quite new gender and generational kinship

This paper will consider how the work of emerging Northern Irish poets who live and work in Great Britain engages with the Northern Irish Troubles. It will interrogate how the geographical displacement of the authors reflects other kinds of distance manifest in the poetry and give critical attention to the peculiarly Northern Irish character of this detachment, considering how this is shaped in particular by the recent history of civil unrest. Taking in particular the work of Colette Bryce (b. 1970) and Nick Laird (b. 1975), two poets who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and who have lived their adult lives in Great Britain, this paper will identify the characteristics of the expatriate Troubles poem in the post-Troubles era. Thus, this paper engages with the cultural memory and legacy of the period as well as examining the contemporary impact and engagement as it is felt through poetry.

Considering Stuart Hall's theories of diasporic identity, which recognize that the individual is bound to the place of origin but also insurmountably distanced from it, this paper will set out to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the diasporic Troubles poem. For example, there is common mode of emotional distancing apparent in Bryce and Laird's poetry. A relentlessly matter-of-fact approach to their memories of the Troubles disguises the closeness of the violence to their own lives; there is no moral outrage or 'struggle to find images and symbols adequate to our predicament' (Seamus Heaney). In fact, in addressing the paraphernalia of armed struggle, the poets are shockingly literal. Bryce can somewhat coldly list the components of a car bomb, 'circuit kit; 4 double-A batteries, 1 9-volt, | 1 SPDT mini-relay, a solar ignitor,' ('Device', The Full Indian Rope Trick). Laird too seems unfeelingly blunt, 'He'd held a bomb the same weight as he'd been when born' ('The Signpost', To A Fault). As Mark Ford points out, Laird reduces 'traces of catastrophe to the merely aesthetic'.

The paper will also consider other distancing methods, such as the deferral of collective responsibility and the refusal to articulate any personal standpoint. This is demonstrable in Bryce's work through the tendency to discuss what 'some' people say or do while making her own views much harder to pin down ('1981', 'Device', The Full Indian Rope Trick). In Laird's work, it is the observing or observed position and the narrative voice that represents the distance between the adult poet and the people who more directly experience the Troubles. He is at once viewed 'An Orange march in Antrim / will see me late arriving' ('The Last Saturday in Ulster', To A Fault) and the controller of the view we see, 'From the Royal's window he got a clear view' (The Signpost, To A Fault).

Finally, this paper will consider if these characteristics are characteristic of Troubles poetry more widely, if they are simply a characteristic of poetry by the younger generation of Northern Irish poets or if they are a characteristic specifically of the Troubles poetry written by the younger generation of Northern Irish poets living in Britain.

Derry born poet Colette Bryce claims that literary criticism finds change hard, saying ‘[m]ale poets are usually criticised in relation to the canon whereas women poets are often discussed as working in a vacuum’. This paper will offer new critical insights into Bryce’s work by considering her in relation to both the canon and the vacuum. However, in an attempt to change critical paradigms in the manner the poet speaks of, it will address her work within a women’s canon and a men’s vacuum.

Following from Alice Entwistle and Jane Dowson’s history of British and Irish twentieth century women’s poetry which identifies Carol Ann Duffy as the major poet in the recent women’s tradition, this study will interrogate the characteristics of such a canon. It will consider the parallels between Bryce and Duffy, exploring in particular the ways in which lesbian sexuality is legitimized in love poetry. It will also address subversion within literary lineage, demonstrating how the poet-precursor becomes the poet-peer in recent literary history. In close reading poems from various stages in Bryce’s career with alongside parallel concerns in Duffy’s work, I will question who influences whom.

The paper will also address how Bryce’s poetry has a problematic relationship with the men poets of the Northern Irish canon. It will suggest how her engagement (or lack of engagement) denies them the canonicity they initially represent. In doing so, I propose Bryce’s poetry writes itself into its own vacuum in which literary authority is subverted.

Hailed for her wry wit and original contemporary lyricism, the 29 poem sequence ‘A Gothic’ from Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn’s most recent collection Profit and Loss (2011) seems to be a new direction. This paper will consider the conventional Gothic tropes being deployed in this sequence (including madness, doubling, screaming women and haunting) in order to interrogate what they reveal about Flynn’s attitude towards genre, poetics and selfhood.

The most unsettling aspect of Flynn’s Gothic is its deliberate fragility. ‘A Gothic’ is barely ‘A Gothic’ at all. While Fred Botting defined Gothic as ‘writing of excess’ (1996), Flynn’s approach subverts this. Her work is restrained; most poems barely exceed two stanzas and make scant reference to the Gothic tropes which supposedly bind them together. The sequence portends to demonstrate Flynn’s approach to legacy, yet family and literary inheritance seem half-achieved. This paper will suggest that a failure of genre (or failing genre) is the only way for a contemporary poet to explore poetic form and individual selfhood.

Further, while it seems that this new angle is tangential to her previous poems about screensavers, city redevelopment and computer programming, perhaps the ‘A Gothic’ sequence also highlights a darker side to her earlier collections which has been overlooked. Has ‘the legendary man in the back with the hatchet’ she notices in These Days (2004) been omnipresent, and if so, where? Re-reading Flynn’s psychoanalytic biographies from Drives (2008) and her student memoirs from These Days, I find evidence of an unstable, low-Gothic style, which Flynn has been suggesting is adequate to our times all along.

This paper will investigate the absence of women in contemporary Northern Irish poetry during an era of exceptional poetic activity within the province and the simultaneous, independent, growth of women's writing outside of the province. The study will explore three kinds of female absence; not being published in single author collections, not being selected for any of the many anthologies of contemporary Ulster verse, and not appearing with any agency in the representations of women in the verse that was being published by famed male poets such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Thus, this paper considers both the 'business' of poetry production and poetry itself to investigate exclusion and the popular conception that there were no Northern Irish women poets of note but for Medbh McGuckian.

The title is taken from a statement by Ruth Hooley, editor of the only women's anthology of writing from the North of Ireland and a member of a collective of women who met to critique their poems together throughout the period. Surveying the field, one finds that her comment, 'this silence is ambiguous. Does it mean an absence - there are hardly any women writing?' is ultimately unambiguous. What poetry's patriarchy during the post-1960 period means for women writing post-1995 is perhaps more ambiguous, and I will conclude by identifying what possibilities might be inherent in an all-male tradition for women post-1995.

This paper will interrogate patriarchal binary value systems and their manifestations in poetry from the North of Ireland during the Troubles. It will ask and attempt to answer the question posed by Hélène Cixous in Sorties (1975): ‘Where is she?’.

Looking at the Northern Irish scene in the mid-1970s it would seem that women found no space in the dominant binaries of the civil unrest. The focus was instead on aggressive and masculinist oppositions such as Catholic/Protestant, Republican/Loyalist and nationalist/unionist. Given the critical attention paid to Troubles writing, and the high acclaim for anthologies such as Padraic Fiacc’s The Wearing of the Black (1974) and Frank Ormsby’s A Rage for Order (1992) it is poignant and timely to question ‘where is she?’ – for women poets from Northern Ireland were overlooked in these otherwise self-consciously inclusive texts.

Moving to identify what space was available to women writers, I will highlight the role of the feminist political movement in bringing writing to press in The Female Line (1984), an anthology of poetry and short fiction already long out of print. This then reveals another marginalising binary between mainstream and ‘grass roots’ writing, and demonstrates that the esteem of poets such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon relies on power and exclusion for much of its existence.

I will prove this rule by exception through attention to Medbh McGuckian, arguably the only Northern Irish women poet to have achieved any literary success pre-ceasefire. Despite her success, McGuckian was notably excluded from A Rage for Order because she did not write ‘about’ the conflict, or at least not in a way that could be understood under patriarchal value binaries. Perhaps it is no surprise then that McGuckian’s work is often accused of ‘difficulty’ in part due to the heavy debt it owes to French feminism.