Women's literary history in Ireland : digitizing The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing

This article takes as its main focus the current collaboration between JSTOR and Field Day to digitize all five volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991-2002) and make these volumes available and searchable within the existing online JSTOR collection. Its central ambition is to consider the impact of this digital transformation on our understanding of Irish women's literary history and, in particular, historic and current debates over the ideologies of national canon-formation in Ireland. This research argues that such transformations have the potential to significantly intervene in, and move forward, the objectives of Irish feminist historiographers and their attempts to disrupt the conventional linear alignment of Irish women's history and literature. In doing so, new discourses are potentially opened up for thinking about digital technologies and their increasingly meaningful relationship with feminist, gender, and women's studies within the humanities.