Custodians of the Earth: The Peasant Woman in Alice Taylor’s Work
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Abstract
Irish writer Alice Taylor has dedicated her literary oeuvre to represent the rural communities of the West of Ireland, paying particular attention to women’s peasants. Her work can be considered as a well documented record of a way of living in danger of extinction. Taylor has published novels, collections of poems and memoirs, focusing in all of them on the activities of male and female peasants, and emphasizing the close relationship that is established between humans and the environment in the communities that she so minutely describes. It is our intention to vindicate the interest of Alice Taylor’s work, to analyse representative texts by the author (poems, memoirs and novels), and to explain the reasons why criticism has ignored the work of an author who is very popular and widely read. We propose to study Taylor’s works taking into account the concepts of “the author as witness” and “historical memory” that have been applied to the study of the also peasant writer John Berger, and to deploy how ecofeminist principles and attitudes are privileged in the relationship between women and nature that Taylor describes.
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References
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