Urban Tales: Women’s Imaginaries in Short Fiction about the Troubles

• Autores: Jorge Rodríguez Durán
• Localización: Taking stock to look ahead: celebrating forty years of English studies in Spain / coord. por María Ferrández San Miguel, Claus Peter Neumann, 2018, ISBN 978-84-16723-51-5, págs. 145-158
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro  1    2 (pdf) 
• Resumen

  • There is an ongoing debate on the relation between gender and genre. Somehow along this line of research, this paper focuses on the analysis of urban imaginaries by Irish women concerning the conflictive Troubles in Northern Ireland. The city has been identified by many scholars as a space strongly marked by ideology (Foucault 1984; Lefebvre 1991). It provokes and inspires otherness through exposure to difference, otherness and frustration that stimulate the artist (Sennett 1990). In the specific case of Northern Ireland, the divisions the cities have such as peace walls, checkpoints and no-go areas prove relevant for the appearance of mindscapes. These mindscapes, or mental scenes, help to give new dimensions to urban space. What matters in this case is how women use these places for creating their urban plots. And it is of my interest to explore the ways in which women, “colonised of the post-colonised” (Smyth 1989, 9-10), interact with these urban spaces