Marisol Morales-LadrónUniversity of Alcalá | UAH · Department of Modern Philology
Marisol Morales-Ladrón
English Spanish Psychology Mphil PhD Comparative Literature
Head, Centre for Irish Studies Alka-Éire
Coord Research Group Irish Studies
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Introduction
Marisol Morales-Ladrón is Full professor of English at the University of Alcalá (Spain) and general editor of the Journal Estudios Irlandeses. Her areas of research include contemporary Irish literature, gender studies and the interrelationship between literature and psychology. She has served her University as Vice-President for Quality Management, Vice-President for Academic and Student Affairs, Director of Academic Affairs, Head of Department, Chair of AEDEI, and Vice-Chair of IASIL.
Additional affiliations
March 2018 - present
July 2015 - March 2018
Education
September 2004 - June 2012
September 1991 - June 1994
September 1986 - June 1991
Publications
Publications (103)
Informed by the theories of Antonio Damasio on the emotional mappings of the mind, the present article probes into the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012), originally written for the stage as a solo play and later adapted into a novella, to disclose the resistance narrative of a grieving mother against the official accounts of t...
This chapter explores Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder (2016) and The Pull of the Stars (2020) as texts that address the wrongs of the male-dominated institutions of religion and medicine, silently complicit of various kinds of female invisibility. As will be discussed from a cultural memory approach, The Wonder , a story tinted with religious fervour an...
Anna Burns, the first Northern-Irish woman to have been awarded the Booker Prize for her novel Milkman in 2018 has been celebrated since then as a lucid and necessary voice in the contemporary panorama. Set in an unknown location in Northern Ireland, at a time when the Troubles were at its peak, the narrative defiantly targets at what appears to be...
Esta investigación doctoral se ocupa de analizar la liminalidad de los personajes femeninos en novelas de ciencia ficción norteamericanas y españolas. Teniendo en cuenta este estudio de carácter comparativo, el objetivo es demostrar cómo esta liminalidad actúa de espacio de cuestionamiento de roles y concepciones de género, así como de territorio l...
DESCRIPTION The Irish writer, Deirdre Madden, has written key novels about the Northern Irish Troubles and about contemporary Ireland. In these works, she weighs up the aftermath of violence and the impact of the shift to a more open but materialist society in the country overall. Memory, trauma, and the abiding but elusive links between the past a...
Claire Keegan is one of the most prominent voices within the contemporary Irish short story panorama. Internationally acclaimed, her prose has been praised for its frank and bitter portrayal of a rural world, whose outdated values, no matter how anchored in the past they might be, still prevail in a modern milieu. Keegan’s unsympathetic views on so...
La recuperación de la memoria histórica y cultural se ha convertido en un tema clave de la actualidad política, con defensores y detractores contribuyendo a un debate sin fin sobre la función del pasado y del recuerdo en la construcción de “la verdad”. Como seres históricos que somos, inevitablemente nuestra identidad es indisoluble de nuestra memo...
The purpose of the present proposal is to look at Anna Burns’ recently acclaimed and award-winning novel, Milkman (2018), in light of Michel Foucault’s theories of bio-power, defined as a “technology of power centered on life” (History of Sexuality 1976). Set in an unknown location in Northern Ireland, the narrative unearths a set of distraught mec...
Arguing that critical approaches to urban literature have often undermined the role of rivers, the present analysis will look at the emotional power that the river Liffey brings about in Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s debut novel You (2010). Informed by ecocritical theory, the discussion will tackle issues connected to the effects of urban and semi-urban hab...
This article offers a short introduction to what was happening to Irish studies in Spain in 2017 and includes reviews by different authors of significant publications.
The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explor...
This article offers a short introduction to what was happening to Irish studies in Spain in 2016 and includes reviews by different authors of significant publications.
Emma Donoghue’s Room achieved international acclaim the moment it was published in August 2010 and, within the year, it had been awarded a considerable number of literary prizes.1 This hit novel, the story of the survival of a captive mother and her child under appalling circumstances and their later adjustment to ‘real’ life, has attracted readers...
Interview with short-story writer Billy O'Callaghan, on the occasion of his invitation to the International AEDEI Conference held in Bilbao in 2014.
Traditionally, war and revolution, as male-oriented duties, kept women not only relegated to the domestic sphere but uninformed about what
was regarded as more serious concerns. However, if men were involved in the war effort, the daily struggle belonged to women, even though they have remained outside mainstream historical accounts and their stori...
Institutionalized through religious, moral and political discourses, the family has become an icon of Irish culture. Historically, the influence ofshe Church and the State fostered the ideal of a nuclear family based on principles of Catholic morality, patriarchal authority, heterosexuality and hierarchy, which acted as the cornerstone of Irish so...
The present chapter looks at how dysfunction has been represented in the literature produced by Irish women writers since the 1980s. In the novels under discussion, dysfunction is defined in terms of the disclosure of a traumatic event that originated in the past but requires a retrospective unearthing of the harmfully blocked memories of the chara...
Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing tendency in Irish literature to unearth the silences, gaps and interstices of history through which subaltern subjects, including women, were recurrently ignored. The need to give voice to alternative ‘minor’ figures that significantly contributed to history but could not make it through the d...
Ever since Deirdre Madden published her first novel, Hidden Symptoms (1986), which dealt with the multifarious symptoms of the Northern Irish Troubles, her fiction has embedded subplots that delved, direct or indirectly, into the character’s emotional responses to the conflict. Although along these two decades her literary production has moved from...
Institutionalized through religious, moral and political discourses, the family has become an icon of Irish culture. This introduction presents the volume and surveys the representation of the concepts of home and family in contemporary Irish narrative and film, approaching the issue from a broad range of perspectives.
This review article outlines the most important achievements of Donoghue’s whodunnit novel. Frog Music (2014), inspired in historical events, encapsulates most of her literary concerns. While the narrative delves into the resolution of a crime that had remained unsolved for over a century, the so-called “San Miguel mystery”, it further engages in m...
A century spans the writings of emblematic Irish authors James Joyce and Colm Tóibín, whose works, apart from the conspicuous socio-economic, historical and contextual differences of their respective times, coincide in portraying characters whose troubled lives are presented as the consequence of wronged familiar upbringings. Reading these two auth...
When Dublinesca appeared in 2010, it soon turned into a literary success, was translated into more than twenty languages, and was very positively received by critics, scholars and general readers, who praised its elegant style, smart wittiness, literary richness and playful homage to Joyce’s literary city. However, the author has assured that the n...
Nuala NíChonchúir is an award-winning and talented poetry and fiction writer with a wide-ranging literary production. She has explored all literary genres and has addressed a great variety of themes, most of them connected with gender issues, male and female troubled relationships, sex, the body, the visual arts, the family and the mother-son/daugh...
Colm Tóibín’s novel, Brooklyn (2009), recounts the story of a young woman who emigrates
from Ireland to the United States in the early 1950s. Although reluctant and discouraged by
received idealized notions of “the promise land” and of a hopeful future, Eilis nevertheless
pursues her desire to fulfil a career of her own and to achieve some kind of...
From the last decade, interest in the rewriting of received notions of the Irish diaspora and of the great famine in the literature produced in Ireland has notably increased, in an attempt to revise both Irish history and identity. Within this impulse in contemporary Irish literature, two enduring authors stand out, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín, wh...
The first novel by essayist and poet Jon Juaristi, La caza salvaje, was awarded the Premio Azorin in 2007. Deeply intellectual and erudite, the narrative opened parodying the beginning of one of the most emblematic works in XXth-century literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Its aesthetic hybridity, together with its transgression of literary and ideol...
This paper tries to shed some light on the reception of Kate O'Brien's works in Spain during Franco's dictatorship. As a lover of Spain, the Irish writer spent long periods of her life in that country and some of her experiences were later fictionalised in her novels. Characterised by her portrayal of strong female heroines who did not respond to s...
Pequeña semblanza biográfica del dramaturgo irlandés John Millingtone Synge, en la ocasión del aniversario de su fallecimiento
James Joyce is undoubtedly one of the most influential writers of contemporary literature. Although his production has been studied in relation to that of other canonical authors such as William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, or Thomas Mann, to name only a few, the comparison of his work with that of other Spanish writers...
Describir el tan rico y variopinto panorama que conforma la narrativa irlandesa contemporánea escrita por mujeres exige tener que elegir y delimitar. Con diferencia, y especialmente desde los años sesenta, la escritura de autoría femenina se ha beneficiado tanto temática como formalmente de los cambios sociales, políticos y económicos que tradicion...
This book represents an attempt to tackle questions related to fragmented and often conflicting ideologies within Irish studies. Although a collective outcome, with contributions in English and Spanish, its unifying concern has been the appliance of postcolonial and gender perspectives to the analysis of Irish literature (prose, drama and verse) an...
Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland "Troubles", interest in exploring the social and political concerns of a region affected by sectarian violence and religious bigotry has produced a significant body of literary works within which the thriller has become one of the most suitable forms of expression. The traditional action thriller has acqu...
Artículo metodológico sobre la historia y tipología de los géneros literarios, según se han construido desde Platón hasta nuestros días.
In his ¿Lecture¿s preliminaries¿ to join the Royal Academy of the Spanish language, Antonio Machado described the works of Marcel Proust and James Joyce as poems of memory and perception. On further occasions Machado commented on Proust¿s literary production and on his connection with Henri Bergson¿s philosophy, although he disregarded Joyce in the...
Bernard Mac Laverty is a Northern Irish writer living in Scotland whose literary production can be inscribed in the so-called " Literature of the Troubles ". In an attempt to avoid simplifying the conflict in Northern Ireland with essentialist dualities such as catholic/protestant, nationalist/unionist, Irish/British or green/orange, my proposal po...
Charles Perrault's " Little Red Riding Hood " or the Brothers Grimm's " Little Red Cap " constitute two versions of a well-known fairy tale whose patriarchal ideology has been the object of most revisions, mainly, by feminist writers. This is the case of Angela Carter, in her famous collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber (1979), who offers...
The first novel by essayist and poet Jon Juaristi, La caza salvaje, was awarded the Premio Azorín in 2007. Deeply intellectual and erudite, the narrative opened parodying the beginning of one of the most emblematic works in XXth-century literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Its aesthetic hybridity, together with its transgression of literary and ideol...
Interview with Northern Irish writer Bernard Mac Laverty
Desde el espacio interior: habitaciones propias y ventanas abiertas... 69 Desde el espacio interior: habitaciones propias y ventanas abiertas en Virginia Woolf y Cam1en Martín Gaite1 Marisol Morales Ladrón UniYersidad de Alcalá Virginia Woolf and Carmen Martín Gaite are two canonical figures within thc English and Spanish Jiterary panorama of the t...
Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) traces the development of a young girl in her process to come to terms with her own identity as a woman who finds love with other women. The novel has frequently been classified as a Bildungsroman and has been interpreted as autobiographical. While the protagonist of Oranges follows the con...
This article explores the similarities between the literary production of Juan Rulfo and James Joyce as regards their special treatment of the themes of life and death. Although this treatment constitutes a major concern throughout their writings, the article concentrates on a close comparative reading of Pedro Páramo and "The Dead". In these texts...
Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984) is a collection of letters addressed to a niece in which the female narrator , named Fay, tries to convince Alice of the significance of Jane Austen's novels. Considered as one of Weldon's pieces of literary criticism , this work has not received much critical attention. In this disc...
The work of the Andalusian writer Juan Ramón Jiménez probably constitutes one of the earliest indications of James Joyce's impact on Spanish literature. Born in 1881, only a year before Joyce, Juan Ramón wrote between the years of 1941 and 1954, a series of critical essays in which we find one dedicated to Joyce, and two long poems in prose entitle...
La escritura de cartas es uno de los medios de comunicación más antiguos de la humanidad, que ha cumplido múltiples y variadas funciones en su evolución histórico-literaria. Desde su carácter de misiva, con un fin puramente comunicativo, pasando por su transformación en un recurso de reconstrucción biográfica, literario e incluso histórica se puede...