Poetic Inheritance: working-class women of the Liverpool-Irish diaspora and cultural and social hybridities

Palmer, June Valerie

Abstract

This thesis comprises both creative and critical work which investigates the cultural inheritance of working-class women in the Liverpool-Irish diaspora and translates the resultant discoveries into the creation of a poetry collection which is conscious of such social and cultural realities as part of its province. The collection, separated into sections, explores the experiences of women in Nineteenth Century Liverpool and beyond: how they see themselves and how others might see them. The Irish poet Eavan Boland said ‘I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life.’[1] Boland strived to co-join the orthodoxies of ‘woman’ and ‘poet’ in Irish poetry, celebrating womanhood whilst unsettling the traditional representations of her sex. I share this outlook in my own practice where there is an acceptance that witness of women’s lives does not always lend itself to traditional lyricism, but on occasion develops an edge, a jitteriness sometimes fuelled by the energy of anger. The critical commentary provides a series of connected critical engagements with specific aspects of the history of Liverpool-Irish women in the nineteenth century, an exploration of gender roles amongst their mid-twentieth-century descendants, and a broader examination of class and gender inequalities in education and academic society during the post-war years. The two thesis components are linked by an in-text examination of the influence of research and a chapter of literary criticism of my creative work, which work aims to provide realistic voices and recognises women who provoke the acceptable boundaries of how they are supposed to live.

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/eavan-boland

Citation

Palmer, J. V. (2025). Poetic Inheritance: working-class women of the Liverpool-Irish diaspora and cultural and social hybridities. (Thesis). Keele University. https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1279920

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Online Publication Date: Jun 26, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 17, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 27, 2025
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1279920
• Award Date: 2025-06