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Patricia Coughlan: The American Wedding Dress

March 19, 2015, 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Location University Hall - 2040
SponsorLucy McDiarmid, Frazee-Baldassarre ProfessorPosted InCollege of Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor Patricia Coughlan of University College Cork will deliver a lecture titled "The American Wedding Dress," an analysis of Maeve Brennan's short story "The Bride." (The story will be distributed a few weeks before the lecture.) Brennan (1917 - 1993), an Irish woman who settled in New York in the 1940s, was the (anonymous) "long-winded lady" famous for her contributions to “The Talk of the Town” in The New Yorker. In recent years the wonderful Brennan has been "rediscovered," and a biography, a play, and a dramatic monologue have all been written about her. Her short story collections include The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden. Professor Coughlan received a Fulbright Scholar Award for a comparative research project on Irish and Irish-American women’s writing. Her project examines feminine, Catholic and ethnic identity constructions and the secular re-envisaging of women’s lives in the mid- to late twentieth century. She is the co-editor of Irish Literature: Feminist Perspectives (2008) and Modernism and Ireland: the Poetry of the 1930s (1995), editor of Spenser and Ireland: an Interdisciplinary Perspective (1990), and author of articles on (among others) Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Alice McDermott, J. S. Le Fanu, Anne Enright, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, John Banville, Edna O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien; her scholarship engages with works in English, Irish, and Latin. This lecture is sponsored by the Marie Frazee-Baldasarre Endowed Chair.