Deirdre Flynn & Ciara L. Murphy 
Austerity and Irish Women s Writing and Culture, 1980 2020 

Austerity and Irish Women s Writing and Culture, 1980 2020 focuses on the under-represented relationship between austerity and Irish women s writing across the last four decades. Taking a wide focus across cultural mediums, this collection of essays from leading scholars in Irish studies considers how economic policies impacted on and are represented in Irish women s writing during critical junctures in recent Irish history. Through an investigation of cultural production north and south of the border, this collection analyses women s writing using a multimedium approach through four distinct lenses: austerity, feminism, and conflict; arts and austerity; race and austerity; and spaces of austerity. This collection asks two questions: what sort of cultural output does austerity produce? And if the effects of austerity are gendered, then what are the gender-specific responses to financial insecurity, both national and domestic? By investigating how austerity is treated in women s writing and culture from 1980 to 2020, this collection provides a much-needed analysis of the gendered experience of economic crisis and specifically of Ireland s consistent relationship with cycles of boom and bust. Thirteen chapters, which focus on fiction, drama, poetry, women s life writing, ?and women’s cultural contributions, examine these questions. This volume takes the reader on a journey across decades and forms as a means of interrogating the growth of the economic divide between the rich and the poor since the 1980s through the voices of Irish women.