Orlaith Darling

Biographic Data

ID6382376
NAMEOrlaith Darling
GIVEN NAMESOrlaith
FAMILY NAMEDarling
SIGNATUREDARLING O
AFFILIATIONSTrinity College Dublin
ORCID0000-0001-6886-7530
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS6
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Generic detachments in contemporary women’s (art) novels

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLETextual Practice2026

    This article examines two novels by contemporary American women writers: Luster by Ravel Leilani (2020) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). It charts some of the ways in which both use art and portrayals of art to theorise late capitalism: its amorphous grip on the aesthetics of the contemporary, and what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as the ‘waning of affect’ under its cultural dominance. I argue, however, that …

  • ‘Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things’

    Orlaith Darling, Áine MahonARTICLEOxford Review of Education2024

    Departments of Arts and Humanities globally face increasing financial threat from falling enrolment, rising costs, and ‘strategic realignment’ at university level. In the UK, in particular, cuts to the Arts and Humanities sector are becoming endemic, with complex ramifications for prospective students as well as academic and professional staff. In light of these structural and ideological challenges, this paper proposes a revisiting of the philos…

  • Writing work

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLEIrish Studies Review2023

    Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by funding from the Irish Research Council and the Rooney Writer Fellowship, as well as support from Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute

  • Introduction

    Orlaith Darling, Liam Harrison et al.ARTICLEIrish Studies Review2023References: 6

    I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing better to do." 1 So wrote Oscar Wilde, in his characteristically glib and stylish manner.The idea of a world without work might well jar with our contemporary minds, as indeed it might have with the working classes of Wilde's own times.Recent world events have put conventional forms of work under strain as well as highlighting forms of work we might p…

  • The Celtic Phoenix, capitalist realism, and contemporary Irish women’s novels

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLEIrish Studies Review2023

    In this article, I analyse the literary realism of four women novelists in the context of the Celtic Phoenix. While realism has always been closely associated with capitalism as a genre and form, a neo-modernist turn emerged in Irish fiction writing in the years following 2012. This has been analysed in terms of a formal reaction to or against the capitalist realism of austerity policies. The realist novel, however, has remained popular with cont…

  • Town’s Dead”

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLEPopular Music & Society2023References: 1

    The increasing “common sense” hegemony of neoliberalism in the west and to the emergence of the internet as a dominant cultural influence have been linked to a “cultural slowdown.” For Mark Fisher and others, contemporary popular culture has lost track of the unfolding conditions of contemporary capitalism and the ability to produce anything new. Instead, it recycles old tropes and forms and is stuck in nostalgia for unlived eras. This article we…

  • Systemic, Transhistoric, Institutionalized, and Legitimized Antipathy”

    Open AccessOrlaith DarlingARTICLEContemporary Women s Writing2021References: 6

    This article concerns the interrelations of epistemic and physical gendered violence in two award-winning contemporary Irish novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and Milkman (2018) by Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, respectively. It argues that patriarchal naming power which defines women as sexual objects is inextricable from the physical violence featured in both texts. Using theories of violence and naming, it examines how, faced with a…

  • [The] immediate heft of bodily and civic catastrophe”

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLEIrish Studies Review2021Cited by: 1References: 3

    Solar Bones encompasses several interlinked crises. Mike McCormack’s 2016 Goldsmith Prize-winning novel speaks to the 2008 financial crash, the environmental and health crisis that was the 2007 cryptosporidium outbreak, political crises such as the Eighth Amendment and Citizenship Referendum, as well as various personal crises which link the local and national body politic. Throughout, McCormack is concerned with the engineering and collapse of s…

  • The moment you realise someone wants your body

    Orlaith DarlingARTICLEFeminist Media Studies2020Cited by: 5References: 4

    Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Fleabag aired on the BBC in 2016 and 2019 to huge critical acclaim and popular interest. Following the fragmented and chaotic life of Fleabag, a London-based young woman, the series charts the anxieties pervading contemporary society, particularly those pertaining to female sexuality, embodimentand subjectivity. This article focuses on the difficulties of female embodiment under neoliberalism, arguing that the “excess” trad…

  • A “Pre-Natal Hold”

    Open AccessOrlaith DarlingARTICLEEstudios Irlandeses2019

    In a tribute to Elizabeth Bowen at the Farahy addresses, her cousin, Martin Mansergh, recalls that “many families, my own included, had an idiosyncratic patriarch, who dominated family life for most of the nineteenth century, and who did much to determine the fortunes of the family through a time of tremendous transition” (41). This patriarchal