Academic literature on the topic '200503 British and Irish Literature'

John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.

Abstract This chapter has eight sections 1. General. 2 British Fiction Pre-1945; 3. British Fiction 1945 to the Present; 4. Pre-1950 Drama; 5. Post-1950 Drama; 6. British Poetry 1900–1950; 7. British Poetry Post-1950; 8. Irish Poetry. Section 1 is by Matthew Levay; section 2(a) is by Francesca Bratton; section 2(b) is by Caroline Krzakowski; section 2(c) is by Sophie Corser; section 2(d) is by Andrew Keese; section 2(e) is by Catriona Livingstone; section 3(a) is by Mark West; section 3(b) is by Samuel Cooper; section 4(a) is by Rebecca D’Monte; section 4(b) is by Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín; section 5 is by Graham Saunders and William Baker; section 6(a) is by Noreen Masud; section 6(b) is by Matthew Creasy; section 7 is by Alex Alonso; section 8 is by Karl O’Hanlon.

Irish migrant workers still make a significant contribution to the UK labour force, but this contribution is confined to particular occupation and industry groups. This paper begins with a brief review of the literature on Irish workers employment and an argument is developed that the work of Irish-born people in Britain is still both racialised and gendered. Then, using data from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS), the work experiences of over one thousand Irish-born people in the UK are explored. The findings suggest that Irish-born men and women still work in the stereotyped occupations of the past. For example, most women work in public administration and health while twenty six per cent of men work in construction. The majority of Irish-born men work in manual skilled or unskilled jobs. The paper concludes that there has been no real qualitative change in the way that Irish-born workers experience employment in the UK.

Contributions to this special issue of Irish Historical Studies come under the dedicated theme of ‘Ireland and the British Empire-Commonwealth’. The papers originate from a workshop entitled ‘Ireland and empire’ that took place at the University of Leeds in March 2005. One of the key objectives behind the organisation of this workshop was to bring together specialists in British, Irish and imperial and Commonwealth history with an interest in the wide-ranging debates linked to the issue of ‘Ireland and empire’. At the workshop, the papers presented a range of topics within the context of literature and the arts; agriculture and industry; metropolitan politics and diplomacy. The overarching theme was the ‘Irish experience’ within an ‘interconnected British world’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845 led to ineffable suffering that sent shockwaves throughout the Anglosphere. The Irish Famine is deemed to be the first national calamity to attract extensive help and support from all around the world. Even though the Irish did not receive adequate support from the British government, their ordeal was mitigated by private charity. Without the donations from a great number of individuals, the death toll among the famished Irishmen and Irishwomen would have been definitely higher. The greatest and most generous amount of assistance came from the United States. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Congress did not decide to earmark any money for the support of famine-stricken Ireland, the horrors taking place in this part of the British Empire pulled at American citizens’ heartstrings and they contributed munificently to the help of the Irish people. Aiding Ireland was embraced by the American press, which, unlike major British newspapers, lauded private efforts to bring succour to the Irish. Such American newspapers as the Daily National Intelligencer, the New York Herald and the Liberator encouraged their readers to contribute to the relief of Ireland and applauded efforts to help the Irish. The aim of this essay is to argue that the American press, in general, played a significant role in encouraging private charity in the United States towards the Irish at the time of An Gorta Mór and, thus, helped to save many lives.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-217). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

LeJeune, Jeff. Bachelor of Science, McNeese State University, 2001; Master of Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017. Major: English Title of Thesis: ?The Violent Take It by Force?: Heathcliff and the Vitalizing Power of Mayhem in Wuthering Heights Thesis Chair: Dr. Christine DeVine Pages in Thesis: 92; Words in Abstract: 284 ABSTRACT In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte employs the character Heathcliff as both a real and mythic being in order to challenge class conventions in Victorian society. She shares this societal contention with other Victorian novelists, but where her contemporaries are typically realistic in their works, Bronte creates a concurrent mythic realm alongside the real in order to allow Heathcliff the space and license to be a Revenant, a symbol used in the folk tradition of the Scots, which I contend was a likely influence on Bronte?s work. Heathcliff?s real nature clashes with this symbolic one, especially when reality will not allow him to be with Catherine, the woman he loves. Her rejection of him serves two central purposes: 1) for the author to spotlight the arbitrary nature of the class system and the decisions individuals make inside it; and 2) for the author to provide a pivot point in the story at which she transforms Heathcliff from a real character to a mythic one. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the novel exacting redemptive punishment on all who have wronged him (and the marginalized he represents), including Catherine herself, a reality he struggles with because he still loves her despite her class-motivated marriage to the hated Edgar Linton. In the end, Heathcliff transgresses his symbolic purpose by going too far in punishing the innocent Hareton, at which point Bronte has him die as unceremoniously as she did Catherine earlier in the novel. Young Hareton and Cathy?s relationship is the fruit of the Revenant Heathcliff?s redeeming work, an ending that, for Bronte, seems to merge more than just the two houses; it seems to also reconcile divergent and conflicting ways of thinking inside the class system.

In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, arguing that Boy, Snow, Bird’s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while Playing in the Light is a “Third Space” in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi’s and Wicomb’s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society’s modifications of its racial perceptions.

This dissertation traces the progress of the personified imagination from the twelfth-century De planctu Naturae to the sixteenth-century Faerie Queene, arguing that the transformability of the personified imagination becomes a locus for questioning personification allegory across the entire period. The dissertation demonstrates how, even while the imagination seems to progress from a position of subordination to a position of dominance, certain features of the imagination's unstable nature reappear repeatedly at every stage in this period's development of the figure. Deep suspicion of the faculty remains a regular part of the imagination's allegorical representation throughout these five centuries. Within the period, we witness the imagination trying to assert its allegorical position in the context of other, more established allegorical figures such as Reason and Nature. In this way, the history of the personification of the imagination is surprisingly continuous from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This "continuity" is not absolute but functions as a consistent recombination of a standard set of features of and attitudes toward imagination that rematerializes regularly. In order to understand this phenomenon at any point in these five centuries, it is essential to examine imagination across the entire period. In particular, the dissertation discovers an alternative, more nuanced view of the personified imagination than has thus far been posited. The imagination is a thoroughly ambivalent character, always on the cusp of transformation, and nearly always locked in a power struggle with other allegorical figures. At the same time, as the allegorical imagination repeatedly attempts to establish itself, it becomes a locus for intense questioning of the meaning and process of personification. The imagination remains transformative, uncertain, and at times terrifying throughout this entire period.

During the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, writers like William Walwyn produced documents contesting the restriction of their liberties. This thesis is a critical edition of Walwyn’s Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie, unedited since its original publication in 1646. In this text Walwyn advocates for man’s right to question religious orthodoxy in his search for Truth and urges Parliament not to pass a proposed Bill for the harsh punishment of religious sectarians.

Prior to a transcription of the text is an introduction to Walwyn and an attempt to situate the reader in the context of his time. Following that is a style and rhetorical analysis, which concludes that despite his rejection of rhetorical practices, Walwyn’s own use of them is effective. Perhaps this skill is one of the reasons that Parliament passed a milder, non-punitive version of the Bill Walwyn argued against.

This dissertation advances Gothic studies by 1) arguing that Gothic is an imperial discourse and tracing back its origins to imperial activity, 2) by establishing a Hinterland Gothics discourse framework within the Gothic Imagination, 3) and by defining three particular discourses of Hinterland Gothics: the Gotach (Irish), Gótico (Mexican-American Mestizx), and the Ethnogothix (African Diaspora), and subsequently, revealing how these Hinterland Gothics undermine, expose, and thwart imperial poltergeists. The primary texts that I analyze and reference were published in the past thirty years and are either of the Young Adult or New Adult persuasion, highlighting imperative moments of identity construction in bildungsroman plots and focusing on the more neglected yet more dynamic hyper-contemporary era of Gothic scholarship, namely: Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (2008), Celine Kiernan’s Into the Grey (2011), Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006), Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009), Virginia Grise’s blu (2011), Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching (2009), Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) and Binti: Home (2017), and Nicki Minaj’s 54^th Annual Grammy Awards performance of “Roman Holiday” (2012). The cold spots in the white Eurocentric canon where Other presences have been ghosted will be filled, specters will be given flesh, and the repressed will return, indict, and haunt, demanding recognition and justice.

This thesis examines Sherlock Holmes texts (1886–1927) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their recreations in the television series Sherlock (2010) and Elementary (2012) through a postcolonial lens. Through an in-depth textual analysis of Doyle’s mysteries, my thesis will show that his stories were intended to be propaganda discouraging the British Empire from becoming tainted, ill, and dirty through immersing themselves in the “Orient” or the East. The ideal Imperial body, gender roles, and national landscape are feminized, covered in darkness, and infected when in contact for too long with the “Other” people of the East and their cultures. Sherlock Holmes cleanses society of the darkness, becoming a hero for the Empire and an example of the perfect British man created out of logic and British law. And yet, Sherlock Holmes’ very identity relies on the existence of the Other and the mystery he or she creates. The detective’s obsession with solving mysteries, drug addiction, depression, and the art of deduction demonstrate that, without the Other, Holmes has no identity. As the body politic, Holmes craves more mystery to unravel, examine, and know. Without it, he feels useless and dissatisfied with life. The satisfaction with pinpointing every detail, in order to solve a mystery continues today in all media versions. Bringing Sherlock Holmes to life for television and updating him to appeal to today's culture only make sense. Though society has the insight offered by postcolonial theory, evidence of an imperial mindset is still present in the most popular reproductions of Sherlock Holmes Sherlock and Elementary.

Literary study has long been concerned with the construction of meaning and identity through language. In the realm of postcolonialism, for instance, it is necessary to consider the ways that racism and sexism are hegemonic constructs that are transmitted and solidified through language. Furthermore, literary texts such as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih engage themselves with revealing the ways that racism, sexism, and colonial discourse function through determinacy or certainty. Moreover, Conrad and Salih are engaged in undermining these enterprises of authoritative discourse by revealing the underlying indeterminacy of language and meaning-making. In other words, they show that meaning exists as humanity constructs it. Thus, it is necessary to consider the ways that they question racism, sexism, and colonialism as movements of thought, discourse, and action that have no rational foundations; and it is necessary to consider the ways that they seek to frame the resistance of these forces in their characters.

This lecture discusses the most extensive collection found in Irish language. It consists of 214 triads and several nonads, tetrads, duads, and single items. An anonymous author composed this collection sometime during the ninth century AD, and included general observations on law, nature, geography, human behaviour, and the Church. Some of the triads in this collection were adapted from earlier sources, but most of them display the vivid style of the author.

Held in September 2003, the conference on ‘Unity and diversity in European culture, c. 1800’ was a joint initiative on the part of the British Academy and the German Historical Institute London. It tackled a topic of central importance to the historiography of Europe during the period: the transition from the cosmopolitan culture of the Enlightenment to the self-consciously national cultures of the nineteenth century. The nine papers, when presented at the conference, were divided into three sessions in which attendees discussed topics ranging from art and its publics, the idea of a national opera, the invention of German music, political culture, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, nationalism, the cultural policy of the British state in European perspective from 1780 to 1850, the invention of national languages, representations of the past in Irish vernacular literature from 1650 to 1850, the marked decline in the degree and importance of patronage by the churches and the nobility, the decline of international languages in favour of national vernaculars and the significance of the ‘fine arts’ as being conducive to social harmony, economic prosperity and political stability.