Ellen Scheible, “Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland”, Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 177 p.

Abstract

From the exposure of the Magdalene Laundries in 1993 to the publication of the Ryan Report in 2009, the Catholic Church’s authority in the Irish Republic has struggled to resurface amid the unrelenting waves of scandal and controversy. Its waning influence over public opinion marks a profound shift in the island’s institutional history and legislative politics. In the wake of the Church’s receding power, Ellen Scheible’s 2025 book, Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland, contributes to the ongoing collective “unveiling of Ireland’s historical traumas” (4), providing an in-depth examination of the multifarious ways literature has revisited and confronted the atrocities of the past.

Through six chapters extending across multiple generations of Irish writers—such as James Joyce and Sally Rooney—the study surveys a wide-ranging selection of prose writings that challenge the idealized Revivalist image foundational to postcolonial Ireland, traditionally modeled on the sanctified figure of the Virgin Mary. With an intersectional focus on the depictions of the Irish domestic interior and the female body, Scheible argues that modern definitions of Irishness were inextricably shaped by a female subjectivity entrenched in binary constructions of gender, the patriarchal “internal policing” within the confines of “the family cell” (15), and the regulation of sexuality and reproductive autonomy.