....................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .......................................................................... iv Table of

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Excessive femininity as resistance in twentieth- and twenty-first century Mexican narrative and visual art

This essay explores how an awareness of trauma theory can transform the experience of reading into an opportunity to bear witness to the cultural contexts and individual traumas that can underlie a narrative, especially a narrative of development that involves deterioration instead of growth and self-actualization. By approaching Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy in this way, this article uncovers the forces that limit Caithleen, the trilogy’s main character: childhood trauma in her family, the difficulties presented by the rural Irish cultural context, the fantasy of heterosexual romance as a salve and supplement for childhood wounds, and the relative dearth of options and social support. These factors—not a personal failure to overcome what are in fact almost insurmountable obstacles—explain Caithleen’s deterioration and collapse of self. Rather than being cause for frustration with her disempowerment, her fate is a call for greater concern over the conditions that caused—and continue to cause—lifelong suffering for women in particular.

Constitutive Trauma in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy: The Romance of Reenactment

The paradigmatic literary work of Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986) narrates the coming of age of two young women from rural backgrounds in the Ireland of the mid-twentieth century and their progressive entry into an adult world, passing through the capital, Dublin, to finally leave their country and arrive in London. Censured in its day, the trilogy is now acknowledged as a feminine Bildungsroman, above all, because of its open allusions to the awakening of female sexuality. However, most criticism has overlooked the political implications of its central theme, as well as the structural and formal innovations that the author employs to represent the impossibility of a feminine Bildung form. Polyphony, fragmentation, and ultimate disintegration are some of the elements that evidence the need to reconsider the place of the trilogy within the panorama of Irish literature.

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Thematic Transgressions and Formal Innovations in Edna O'Brien's the Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

A Grand Tragedy: The Progression and Regression of Gender Roles in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy and House of Splendid Isolation

O'Brien, Edna

(2002). In the Name of the Mother … : The Epilogue of Edna O Brien s Country Girls Trilogy. Women's Studies: Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 447-465.

Kristine A Byron

Papers

In the Name of the Mother … : The Epilogue of Edna O Brien s Country Girls Trilogy

Cultural revisions of gender and the mexican revolution