“Not evil or irredeemable”: Women, Bodies and Sorority in Donal Ryan’s All We Shall Know

Abstract

It is my intention to provide an analysis of Donal Ryan’s novel All We Shall Know (2016) whose themes include an insight into the culture of the Irish Travellers, the complexity mother-daughter relationships, the burden of guilt and the possibility of redemption, among others. My aim is to analyse the intersections of gender and ethnicity in Donal Ryan’s work, applying concepts related to the female body and motherhood. In the first chapter I will provide a summary of Donal Ryan’s novel, as well as a general commentary on the representation of the Irish Travellers in the novel, focusing on their status as the ‘other’. In the second section of the dissertation, first, I will offer some context for the situation of Traveller women, both in their culture and in the settled community. I will reflect, as well, on the experiences of the protagonist as a pregnant woman, connecting it with other issues such as abortion, infertility and sexuality, offering different accounts from the novel’s characters. In the last chapter, I set out to analyse relationships between the female characters, focusing on the topics of motherhood and sisterhood