“Single Out the Devalued”: The figure of the nonhuman animal in Eavan Boland’s poetry

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dc.contributor.authorO'Connor, Maureen
dc.date.accessioned2022-11-07T13:19:04Z
dc.date.available2022-11-07T13:19:04Z
dc.date.issued2021-05-23
dc.date.updated2022-10-28T14:08:28Z
dc.description.abstractBoland has argued that “good nature poets are always subversive” and, though she did not identify as a nature poet, she compares her praxis to theirs: “their lexicon is the overlooked and the disregarded…. They single out the devalued and make a deep, metaphorical relation between it and some devalued parts of perception.” Boland’s engagement with the “natural” rarely provides a focus for analyses of her work, which predominantly attend to the poet’s own frequently identified preoccupations: her relationship to history, especially Irish history, and her role as an Irish woman writing within and against a largely male-dominated tradition. However, both of these issues of ambivalent and insecure identification and situatedness are implicitly connected to cultural constructions of the “natural.” This essay traces Boland’s negotiation with a legacy of Irish women’s silence by considering the appearance of the nonhuman animal in her verse, which evolves from traditional metaphor to a figure that challenges representational norms and expectations, thereby transvaluing the signifying power of silence and questioning the status of language itself, particularly as a uniquely human construct.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationO’Connor, M. (2021). “Single Out the Devalued”: The Figure of the Nonhuman Animal in Eavan Boland’s Poetry. ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 23(2), pp. 35-49. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v23i2.197751en
dc.identifier.doi10.37389/abei.v23i2.197751en
dc.identifier.endpage49en
dc.identifier.issn2595-8127
dc.identifier.issued2en
dc.identifier.journaltitleABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studiesen
dc.identifier.startpage35en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/13824
dc.identifier.volume23en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherAssociação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses and University of São Pauloen
dc.relation.urihttps://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v23i2.197751
dc.relation.urihttps://www.revistas.usp.br/abei/article/view/197751
dc.rights© 2021 Maureen O'Connor. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/en
dc.subjectIrish women’s writingen
dc.subjectIrish poetryen
dc.subjectEcofeminismen
dc.subjectNew materialismen
dc.subjectAnimal studiesen
dc.subjectEavan Bolanden
dc.title“Single Out the Devalued”: The figure of the nonhuman animal in Eavan Boland’s poetryen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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