Alice's Garden: Imagining agency in the natural world in Clare Boylan's Black Baby

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dc.contributor.authorO'Connor, Maureen
dc.contributor.funderMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovaciónen
dc.contributor.funderEuropean Regional Development Funden
dc.contributor.funderAgencia Estatal de Investigaciónen
dc.date.accessioned2022-11-07T13:03:27Z
dc.date.available2022-11-07T13:03:27Z
dc.date.issued2020-10-31
dc.date.updated2022-10-28T15:05:10Z
dc.description.abstractThe Irish writer Clare Boylan is something of a forgotten figure, despite enjoying significant literary success in her lifetime. Because of her untimely death, little critical work has been done on her fiction. Her blackly comic sensibility responds sensitively to characters situated in culturally specific environments, with particular attention paid to the vexed and contradictory position of women in their relationship to the natural world, and so this essay conducts a reading of her 1988 novel, Black Baby, using the insights of feminist new materialism and critical posthumanism, especially as articulated by Rosi Braidotti. In every genre, contemporary Irish women’s writing finds space in the natural world to explore alternatives to the status quo. Black Baby imagines an interracial family of women (and cats) in the enchanted environment of a miraculously blooming winter garden. By staging Alice’s most transformative moments, including her final moments of semi-consciousness, in a garden, Boylan makes recourse to the idea of an unending, generative process. Nothing really dies when life is no longer an individualised experience, but an impersonal moment of radical inclusion that exceeds the material limits of any one life span.en
dc.description.sponsorshipMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Research Project “Bodies in Transit 2”, ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P)en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationO’Connor, M. (2020) ‘Alice’s garden: Imagining agency in the natural world in Clare Boylan’s Black Baby’, Estudios Irlandeses, pp. 42–52. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2020-9752en
dc.identifier.doi10.24162/EI2020-9752en
dc.identifier.endpage52en
dc.identifier.issn1699-311X
dc.identifier.issued2en
dc.identifier.journaltitleEstudios Irlandesesen
dc.identifier.startpage45en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/13823
dc.identifier.volume15en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherSpanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI)en
dc.relation.urihttps://doi.org/10.24162/EI2020-9752
dc.rights© 2020 by Maureen O’Connor | This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for accessen
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/en
dc.subjectClaire Boylanen
dc.subjectEcofeminismen
dc.subjectFeminist new materialismen
dc.subjectIrish Roman Catholic missionariesen
dc.subjectIrish women's writingen
dc.subjectRacismen
dc.titleAlice's Garden: Imagining agency in the natural world in Clare Boylan's Black Babyen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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