Böcker av Caroline Magennis

'Harpy is a tonic; a tongue-in-cheek manual for dealing with Spanish Inquisition-style questioning about saying pass to procreation and building an enriching life beyond the nuclear family' VOGUE 'Harpy made me nod in recognition, and shake my head with sorrow, and then it made me laugh out loud' EMILIE PINE, author of NOTES TO SELF and RUTH & PEN 'Defiant, funny and inspiring' SEÁN HEWITT, author of ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE Each generation has more childfree women than the one before. For many, it is an active decision made for a wide range of reasons. Despite this growing trend, we continue to live in a society where women are often judged for deciding to remain childfree - for not conforming to narrow expectations. For being a Harpy. In this timely and thoughtful book, Caroline Magennis looks beyond the often-divisive conversation around women who choose to be childfree and offers an alternative message of hope and celebration. With humour and intelligence, she explores why motherhood isn't right for everybody and how any woman - whether a parent or childfree - can live a full life, while also reminding the reader that your freedoms and the right to autonomy should never be taken for granted.

Both masculinity and the Northern Irish conflict have been the subjects of a great deal of recent scholarship, yet there is a dearth of material on Northern Irish masculinity. Northern Ireland has a remarkable literary output relative to its population, but the focus of critical attention has been on poetry rather than the fine novels that have been written in and about Ulster. This book goes some way towards remedying the deficiency in critical attention to the Northern Irish novel and the lack of gendered approaches to Northern Irish literature and society. Sons of Ulster explores the representation of masculinity within a number of Northern Irish novels written since the mid-1990s, focusing on works by Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson. One of the key aims of the book is to disrupt notions of a hegemonic Northern Irish masculinity based on violent conflict and hyper-masculine sectarian rhetoric. The author uses the three sections of the text to represent the three key facets of Northern Irish masculinity: bodies, performances and subjectivity bound up with violence.