Special Issue for LIT / The Anger Issue: Women’s Writing and Anger in Ireland

Deadline for full essays: July 15, 2026

“Women are really angry. I am. And it’s not that I spend my life charging round in a rage, but I do feel a really deep, burning sense of injustice at the way women are treated in our world and the way that I’ve been treated in the world and I want to write about that. Guilt was the only thing that women were allowed to write about. Anger was a male emotion and it was appropriate only to men. Angry women were crazy, and I feel very much: ‘Fuck you with all of that’” (Eimear McBride, The Guardian 2020). Eimear McBride’s words speak to a relatively unconsidered, but deeply present, element of women’s writing in Ireland, both in the past and the present. Women in Ireland have had much to be angry about, from colonial subjection that reinforced gendered oppression, to the entwined Catholic and State structures that directly and indirectly dominated women’s lives, to the neoliberal era of austerity, exploitation, and biopolitical control. In a terrible and tragic irony, the death of Sinead O’Connor—who most embodied the power, threat, and vulnerabilities of Irish women’s rage—recalled the nation (indeed the world) to rethink the importance of her anger. This special issue takes women’s anger seriously, curating a collection of critical and scholarly engagements with literary configurations of female anger and rage in Irish writing across periods and genres. We welcome essays that explore contemporary literature, as well as those that engage in critical reassessments of historical women’s writing in earlier periods. 

Essays may explore the following topics, although this list is not exhaustive: 

• Anger as a tool / activist object

• Writing in the age of post #MeToo and Repeal

• Trans women and the politics of anger

• Biopower, direct provision, and immigration regimes 

• Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalen Laundries

• Recovering rage in early modern women’s writing

• Colonial contexts and Irish women’s anger

• Rage on stage

• Disability and illness narratives

• Reproductive politics and women’s health

• Anger and revenge in women’s folklore

• Rage and heteronormative structures of power

• Rage and literary form

• Anger and the Irish canon

LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory publishes critical essays that employ engaging, coherent

theoretical perspectives and provide original, close readings of texts. Submissions must use MLA citation style and should range in length from 5,000-7,000 words (due date is July 15, 2026). Please direct any questions relating to this CFP to the guest co-editors Abby Bender (bendera5@sacredheart.edu) and Claire Bracken (brackenc@union.edu). Submissions should be emailed to litjourn@yahoo.com. Please include your contact information and a 100- to 200-word abstract in the body of your email. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory also welcomes submissions for general issues. 

Guest Co-editors: Abby Bender, Sacred Heart University and Claire Bracken, Union College.