Rebecca Anne Barr

Irish Women in History

THE experiences of women and the role of gender have often been occluded in Irish historiography. Thankfully, this disciplinary resistance has produced a particularly vigorous form of women’s history in Ireland. During the current ‘decade of commemoration’, in which an anxious and penurious state oversees the revision of narratives of nation, politics and literature, writing women back into Ireland’s history has become an even more urgent task. In contrast to the current academic monomania for cultural commemoration, Reading the Irish Woman takes a longer view of women’s history. Instead, this ambitious multi-authored work focuses on the ‘changing roles and perceptions of Irish women’ by analysing ‘the processes of cultural influence and exchange’ (1) over the span of centuries. Taking the Enlightenment, emigration and modernism as ‘three key points of cultural encounter’ which transformed women’s experiences in both Ireland and the American diaspora (1), the volume frames its material in transnational and multidisciplinary terms. Structured as three connected case studies, the work utilizes an admirable range of sources: eighteenth-century Irish publications on female education, Irish-language manuscripts, periodicals from the 1700s to the 1960s, modernist drama and extensive oral histories. The authors’ introduction emphasizes their refusal to force their disparate material into ‘a one size fits all’ explanation of gender and cultural influence and change (1). Similarly, the volume legitimates its methodological variety in the fact that such cultural histories are possible only via collaboration and disciplinary cross-fertilization. The book opens with a survey of the link between enlightenment, literacy and print in eighteenth-century Ireland. This convincingly situates Irish print culture within the context of an international debate on women’s intellectual and moral capacities. Ideas on women’s education were disseminated via French translations, Irish reprints of English conduct literature, Dublin editions of feminist works such as Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal (1694), and compendia such as George Berkeley’s The Ladies Library (1714), which promoted limited education under the aegis of domestic, moral and religious improvement. Reappraising the Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd and Bernadette Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714–1960, Liverpool University Press, 2013, £75.00 hardback 978 1 8463 1892 4. R E V I E W ...............................................................................................................

Pathological Laughter and the Response to Ridicule: Samuel Richardson, Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding

Cet article se fonde sur un echantillon d’ouvrages du milieu du siecle, de Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, et Jane Collier, pour examiner la facon dont ces œuvres prennent part au debat sur la moralite du rire. Loin de simplement rejeter la comedie et de substituer les soupirs de la sensibilite au naturel du bel esprit, ces auteurs s’interessent tout particulierement a la signification du rire, a sa moralisation et a sa legislation. En tant qu’affect naturel et spontane, a la fois physiologique et cognitif, le rire prolonge, tout en la contestant, l’ambition de la sensibilite a incarner la moralite. Je souhaite montrer que meme dans le roman serieux, et peut-etre surtout dans ce genre litteraire, l’epistemologie du rire acquiert une importance capitale. Loin de promouvoir exclusivement une sensibilite lacrymale, ces auteurs sentimentaux ambitionnaient parfois de “corriger les inepties [des lecteurs] par le rire” malgre un malaise fondamental au sujet du statut moral de ce dernier.