Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women's Writing

The volume was originally published as a special issue of the journal LIT (Literature, Interpretation, Theory) back in 2017, and the editors deliver a thought-provoking introduction, providing a comprehensive overview of the philosophical significance of the project and the writers who have been included. The critical essays are therefore an important intervention to the extent that they show how Irish women writers have been immersed in the ethical quandaries of the Celtic Tiger from an early stage, questioning "gendered constructions of late capitalism" and "the ways in which Irish recessionary culture locates the feminine as a site of blame for the excesses of the Tiger period" (2). O'Neill reads the authors' respective novels, Room and Brightest Star, as illustrating "the violence inflicted by neoliberal systems of economic and social repression" (75). Situating the two writers with respect to the social impact of the banking bailout and austerity, O'Neill sees the characters of Room as subject to a regime of "biopolitical control" that, following Sara Ahmed's theory of "migrant orientation" (75), calls for a queer reorientation of the neoliberal subject.