ABSTRACT
Putting world-systems and materialist feminist schools in conversation with work about the Celtic Tiger, this article engages with critical conversations about capitalist modernity in Ireland, contending that it cannot be delinked from gender and sexual politics. I examine how anxieties about capitalist development in Ireland are gendered in the literary aesthetics of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, albeit very differently. My subsequent discussion of Aislinn Hunter’s novel, Stay (2002), shows how it draws on Irish literary inheritance to illustrate the tension between perceived traditional values, on the one hand, and modernity on the other. I suggest that tradition is a part of rather than opposite to modernity: I argue for the simultaneity of tradition and modernity. In both its form and content, Hunter’s novel considers how capitalist modernity is always already specifically gendered.
