Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter (Editors), Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts (Book Review‪)‬

Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter (editors), Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts. Cork: Cork University Press, 2007. vii +181 pages. EUR 39.00. This collection, with its at once playful and suggestive reference to the fierce debates engendered by the publication of the first three volumes of The Field Day Anthology in 1991, and the subsequent publication of Volumes IV and V in 2002, enters the fray with a selection of essays that addresses some issues surrounding the anthology and, more broadly, ideas of canonicity, nationalism, gender, and Irish identity. This question of identity had been central to the earlier volumes, but the virtual neglect of women writers in the anthology and accusations of a nationalist bias, culminated in the publication of Volumes IV and V, with their singular focus on Irish women's writing. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter, editors of Opening the Field, highlight in their introduction that debates about identity have not been allayed by the latest Field Day volumes, but intensified, complicated, and enriched. Feminist, postcolonial, and postmodernist perspectives are all shown to have had an impact on the conceptualization of 'the multiplicities of Irish identity' (p.4).