ABSTRACT
Contemporary women’s writing in the recessionary and post-recessionary periods is a powerful site of neoliberal critique. The envisaging of women's writing in Ireland in terms of a continuum is first and foremost about establishing non-homogenous connections, highlighting both continuities and divergences across time and place. The work of contemporary women's writing has been particularly attentive to processes of social and economic marginalization in the recessionary period, something brilliantly explored in Lisa McInerney's novel The Glorious Heresies, winner of the 2016 Bailey Award and Rita Ann Higgins' poetry collection Ireland Is Changing Mother. One of the exciting possibilities for this book is that it plays a role in the continued shaping of the continuum of women's writing in Ireland, connecting to the past and to the future in a field that is ever shaping anew.
