Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers

Contents

Contents Foreword ix Caledonia Kearns Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Writing Green Thoughts 1 Sally Barr Ebest WOMEN IN IRISH AMERICAN SOCIETY CHAPTER 1. Mary McCarthy: Too Smart to Be Sentimental 27 Sally Barr Ebest CHAPTER 2. Maureen Howard’s “Landscapes of Memory” 52 Patricia Keefe Durso CHAPTER 3. Moments of Kindness, Moments of Recognition: The Achievement of Maeve Brennan 81 John M. Menaghan RELIGION AND ETHICS CHAPTER 4. “Forget about Being Irish”: Family, Transgression, and Identity in the Fiction of Elizabeth Cullinan 97 Kathleen McInerney CHAPTER 5. Alice McDermott’s Narrators 116 Beatrice Jacobson Ebest 000.FM 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page vii ORAL TRADITIONS CHAPTER 6. Tess Gallagher: A Network of Sympathies and Distant Connections 139 Mary Ann Ryan CHAPTER 7. “I’m Your Man”: Irish American Masculinity in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates 157 Susana Araújo SEXUALITY CHAPTER 8. Hardly Sentimental: The “Bad Girls” and Lonely Men of Mary McGarry Morris’s Fiction 171 Patricia Gott CHAPTER 9. Blurring Boundaries: Eileen Myles and the Irish American Identity 189 Kathleen Ann Kremins FEMINISM, CULTURE, AND CRITIQUE CHAPTER 10. The World of Mary Gordon: Writing from the “Other Side” 201 Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw CHAPTER 11. Jean McGarry: Sojourners Between Dreams and Realities 220 Amy Lee CHAPTER 12. Erin McGraw: Expanding the Tradition of Irish American Women Writers 233 Sally Barr Ebest About the Contributors 248 Index 251 viii | Contents Ebest 000.FM 10/1/07 1:13 PM Page viii ...