{"id":14417,"date":"2013-03-23T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=14417"},"modified":"2013-03-23T02:57:11","modified_gmt":"2013-03-23T07:57:11","slug":"austin-peay-state-university-professor-jill-franks-publishes-new-book-on-british-and-irish-women-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2013\/03\/23\/austin-peay-state-university-professor-jill-franks-publishes-new-book-on-british-and-irish-women-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"Austin Peay State University professor Jill Franks publishes new book on British and Irish women writers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – A few years ago, Dr. Jill Franks, Austin Peay State University professor of English, decided to change up a course she taught on Irish literature. Instead of focusing on that country\u2019s noted male authors, such as James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, she opted to teach about Ireland\u2019s underrepresented female authors, including Elizabeth Bowen and Edna O\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n

Franks had recently taught a similar class on female British writers, and with these subjects fresh on her mind, she began noticing fascinating distinctions between the two cultures and how they handled the evolution of the women\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Jill Franks, APSU professor of English, reads through her new book, \u201cBritish and Irish Women Writers and the Women\u2019s Movement: Six Literary Voices of Their Times.\u201d (Photo by Beth Liggett\/APSU staff)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI wondered how are the two women\u2019s movements different and how are their differences reflected in these novels,\u201d she said. \u201cIn both countries, the women\u2019s movement was linked with other movements which gave them their flavor. In Ireland, it was the struggle for Irish independence. In England, it was linked to socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Franks spent the next two years delving into this topic, which resulted in her new book, \u201cBritish and Irish Women Writers and the Women\u2019s Movement: Six Literary Voices of Their Times.\u201d The book was released this month from McFarland Publishers.<\/p>\n

For this scholarly study, Franks picked three British and three Irish writers who wrote during the three different waves of feminist movement. For each wave, she paired a British writer and an Irish writer, and noted the differences in how they depicted society during each wave.<\/p>\n

During the first wave, which focused on the women\u2019s suffrage movement of the early 20th century, Franks examined Bowen\u2019s Irish novel \u201cThe Last September\u201d and Virginia Woolf\u2019s English book \u201cMrs. Dalloway.\u201d For the second wave, which dealt with issues of women\u2019s liberation during the 1960s, Franks looked at O\u2019Brien\u2019s Irish \u201cCountry Girls\u201d trilogy and Doris Lessing\u2019s British book \u201cThe Golden Notebook.\u201d Finally, in the third wave, which often criticized the failures of the second wave, she examined Irish writer Nuala O\u2019Faolain\u2019s \u201cMy Dream of You\u201d and English writer Fay Weldon\u2019s \u201cBig Women.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole book has a stated purpose to bring Irish writers out of relative obscurity, and also to inquire whether there is an Irish women\u2019s movement, even though it gets subsumed in other movements and looks quite different from the British movement,\u201d Franks said.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien\u2019s \u201cCountry Girls Trilogy\u201d of the second wave exposes the heavy repressions by the Irish Catholic Church and Irish nation. That\u2019s because Ireland was coming out of a long, 40-year era of censorship and an economic depression. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the adventurous Lessing wrote more freely about her experiences as a communist.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 1960s, England was progressive and independent enough to entertain a large communist party, whereas in the first half of the 20th century, the International Communist Party didn\u2019t take hold in the Irish climate because of its antipathy to Catholicism,\u201d Franks said. \u201cLater, however, there were labor movements whose interests sometimes aligned with the continuing nationalist movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

[320left]In 2006, McFarland & Company published Franks\u2019 third book \u201cIslands and the Modernists,\u201d a groundbreaking scholarly work that examined how pioneers in the fields of anthropology, literature, painting and evolution used islands as real and metaphorical laboratories.<\/p>\n

In 2010, she was named the recipient of APSU\u2019s Richard M. Hawkins Award, which is presented every year for exceptional scholarly and creative work produced by a faculty member. She joined the APSU faculty in 1996 and has since published numerous books, articles, biographical and critical essays and reviews in highly regarded journals and books. Franks has also written introductions for a 2004 edition of Lawrence\u2019s \u201cLady Chatterley\u2019s Lover\u201d and a 1999 edition of Lawrence\u2019s \u201cSea and Sardinia.\u201d In 2011-12, she was a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University.<\/p>\n

She previously served as the president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America and is associate editor of the prestigious D.H. Lawrence Review. Her position with that organization helped APSU\u2019s Woodward Library become the recipient of the late Dr. James Cowan\u2019s extensive D.H. Lawrence Collection. The Lawrence Collection includes numerous books, including originals, Cambridge editions, and biographical and scholarly works. The items are now shelved in the library, providing APSU students with unprecedented access to original works by and about one of the 20th century\u2019s leading writers.<\/p>\n

She will read from her new book during a special reception at 2:00pm on April 6th at Parnassus Books in Nashville\u2019s Green Hills neighborhood. For more information, please contact Franks at franksj@apsu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – A few years ago, Dr. Jill Franks, Austin Peay State University professor of English, decided to change up a course she taught on Irish literature. Instead of focusing on that country\u2019s noted male authors, such as James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, she opted to teach about Ireland\u2019s underrepresented female authors, including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,262,825,18304,18303,18301,4697,18305,4950,18306,7859,1020,14323,18302,2216],"class_list":["post-14417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","tag-apsu","tag-austin-peay-state-university","tag-clarksville-tn","tag-edna-obrien","tag-elizabeth-bowen","tag-james-joyce","tag-jill-franks","tag-mcfarland-publishers","tag-nashville-tn","tag-parnassus-books","tag-richard-m-hawkins-award","tag-vanderbilt-university","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-william-butler-yeats","tag-woodward-library"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-3Kx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14417"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14419,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14417\/revisions\/14419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}