Dissertations / Theses: 'Irish literature'

1

Frawley, Oona. "Irish pastoral : nostalgia and twentieth-century Irish literature /." Dublin : Irish academic press, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb400138598.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

2

Sheridan, Ríonnagh. "'Irish ways and Irish laws' : literature and law in the contemporary Irish novel." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2016. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709817.

Full text

Abstract:

This study reads five contemporary novels by Irish writers to examine the reciprocal influences of law and Irish fiction in their work. The selected workds by Colm T ib n, Edna O’Brien, John Banville, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack span a relatively short period of time (1989 to 2013) but take a long view of the fraught relationship between the Irish people and institutions of legal, political and social power, from the enactment of the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na h ireann to the apparent breakdown in the legitimacy of the state following the Celtic Tiger crash of 2008. Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel, tracing different thematic and formal appropriations of law or law-like systems across a broad developmental arc, from the critical realism of Colm T ib n through to the historiographic metafiction of Kevin Barry and the domestic science fiction of Mike McCormack.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

3

Lehner, Stefanie Florence. "Subaltern aesthethics : tracing counter-histories in contemporary Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/3305.

Full text

Abstract:

This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

4

Kennedy, Eimear. "Intercultural encounter in Irish-language travel literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2017. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.727414.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis explores contemporary Irish-language travel literature, a genre that has been largely ignored in Irish literary criticism to date. Unlike travel literature in major world languages, such as English and French, Irish-language travel literature does not have a long-established link with colonialism. It is only in more recent years, as social and economic conditions in Ireland improved and emigration began to give way to travel for leisure purposes, that the field has begun to develop. Given the significant differences between the history of the genre in Irish and other major world languages, this study interrogates how/whether the cultural background of Irish-language travel writers differs to that of other international writers and examines how this impacts upon their interactions with other peoples and other cultures. In order to explore these questions, this thesis draws on postcolonial theory and travel, tourism and mobility studies to investigate intercultural encounter. It pays particular attention to the work of four contemporary writers: Manch^n Magan, Gabriel Rosenstock, Cathal 0 Searcaigh and Dutch-born Alex Hijmans. These writers are minority-language speakers who come from, or who have lived in, Ireland, a country on the periphery of Western Europe that was the victim of colonization, yet they are also relatively wealthy Western Europeans. Thus this study examines how their distinct cultural background alongside their economic privilege affects their encounters with travellees and investigates the associated issues of representation, power and ethics. Ultimately, this thesis provides a new critical insight into Irish-language travel literature which, in turn, has implications for how we study travel writing in languages associated with former imperial powers. The 'in-between' positioning of Irish-language travel writers transcends the conventional dichotomised approach to encounter, provides new perspectives into intercultural contact and proposes a new, dynamic and counterdiscursive 'third space’ that accommodates fluid cultural identities.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

5

Quaintmere, Max. "Aspects of memory in medieval Irish literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9026/.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis explores a number of topics centred around the theme of memory in relation to medieval Irish literature roughly covering the period 600—1200 AD but considering, where necessary, material later than this date. Firstly, based on the current scholarship in memory studies focused on the Middle Ages, the relationship between medieval thought on memory in Ireland is compared with its broader European context. From this it becomes clear that Ireland, whilst sharing many parallels with European thought during the early Middle Ages based on a shared literary inheritance from the Christian and late-classical worlds, does not experience the same renaissance in memory theory that occurred in European universities from the thirteenth century onwards. Next, a detailed semantic study of memory terms in Old and Middle Irish is provided with the aim of clarifying, supplementing and revising the definitions found in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language. Whilst the two principal memory nouns, cuimne and mebair, appear largely synonymous, the verb mebraigid appears to lean towards favouring the sense of ‘committing to memory,’ whereas cuimnigid(ir) encompasses this sense in addition to that of ‘recalling from memory.’ The third part of this thesis re-evaluates the dichotomous tension between notions of orality and literacy which some scholars have found in medieval Irish literature, arguing that this aspect has perhaps been exaggerated and that memory was a fluid concept in medieval Ireland embracing and merging both oral and textual forms. Following this, an assessment is made as to the importance and function of memory within the learned culture of the filid emphasising its necessary significance in a culture still partly based in an oral world. A wide range of sources including legal texts, grammatical tracts and tale literature is explored to show that the filid’s idealisation of memory was, largely, as a broad, comprehensive source supplying the knowledge necessary to acquire prestige through its performance and expression in a social context. The last part of this thesis investigates the notion that memory of the past could be used for the purposes of propaganda in medieval Ireland through the case study of the Ulster Cycle tales. Summarising and criticising some of the key prior scholarship in this area, this final section advocates for a much more cautious approach when claiming Ulster Cycle tales demonstrate political leanings, and that these must include or reconcile other more literary based interpretations of the themes and characters in these texts in order to remain successful as critical readings.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

6

Phillips, Veronica Middleton. "Authority and dispossession in medieval Irish literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708252.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

7

Stubbs, Tara M. C. "'Irish by descent' : Marianne Moore, Irish writers and the American-Irish Inheritance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf87b5ea-4baa-4a46-9509-2c59e738e2a1.

Full text

Abstract:

Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

8

Reimer, Eric J. "'My passport's green' : Irishness in the new world order /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3055706.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-231). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

9

McAleavey, James. "Spenser and a beginning for Anglo-Irish literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.388222.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

10

Wydenbach, Joanna Susan. "Irish women's fiction 1900-1924 : literature and history." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.437734.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

11

Heaney, Liam Francis. "Aspects of scientific thought in modern Irish literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337048.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

12

Mooney, Mick. "The position of the child in Irish literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/39036/.

Full text

Abstract:

The thesis is fundamentally an interrogation of what is called the 'position of the child' vis-à-vis the 'position of the father'. The concept of the child as defined by age, knowledge, experience, or innocence is dismissed. The concept of position is drawn from Lacan's Schema L and Schema R which map out relations between the registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Schema L is used to define the position of the child, or the subject who is both defined and excluded from a relation, and also what is called the position-as-child in a father-occluded Imaginary, produced from a culture with phallic jouissance as its dominant mode of pleasure and pain. The logic of such a culture is of the phallic exception. Schema R is skewed in Figure 3 to sketch a model of 'phallic mobility' and 'feminine mobility' between the father and child positions, as well as a Law of the Father and a Law of Desire. Foucault's analysis of Western sexuality from the eighteenth century onwards is proffered as the historical basis for the Law of the Father, when the parent-child relation becomes preponderant as the socialisation process. Around this period, literature develops a notably half-articulated (Imaginary) relation between writer and reader in Sentimental and Romantic discourse, and the position-as- child becomes a staple of aesthetic as well as regulatory, political interest. The military and structural violence of colonialism forcibly imposes an English 'position-as-child' on a native populace. The colonial ideology comprising a half-articulated, nostalgic, analeptic and Imaginary framing of both native culture and the child is considered a means for overdetermining a proleptic path the native and child then must follow towards a colonial and patriarchal position of the father. The glaring (phallic) exception to half-articulation is Romantic Hamlet. Dispossessed of land and title, incredibly articulate yet politically inept, Hamlet falls every time in Act 5 just like MacPherson's ideal for the Celt in Ossian (1765). How the reception of Hamlet in Romanticism peculiarly ignores the question of land, and how Hamlet invites a neighbouring, Nordic nation to establish a government is, at a period of colonial expansion, eminently gratuitous. Hamlet is the idealised position-as-child in a historically situated, colonial-inspired, father-occluded Imaginary. The main body of the thesis then proceeds by chapters on authors and the voices of characters reaching for a healing in a father-occluded Imaginary.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

13

Blustein, Rebecca Danielle. "Kingship, history and mythmaking in medieval Irish literature." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1432770931&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

14

Snyder, Taylor A. "Mother Ireland and Her Daughters: Irish Women Writers and their Contributions to the Irish Literary Identity." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1367599203.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

15

Rea, Jennifer Anne. "Adventures on Windswept Islands: Children's Literature, Adolescence, and the Possibilities of Irish Culture in the Work of Eilís Dillon." OpenSIUC, 2011. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/339.

Full text

Abstract:

Eilís Dillon, in her young adult novels, evokes to her readers rich images: wind blowing in off the cold and vast Atlantic Ocean over the rugged landscape of rocks and stone-walls with ancient forts inhabiting the highest points, and thatched roof houses squat and solid against nature. This dissertation will explore the multifaceted position of the fictional child, the reader and adult as they each encounter exhilarating adventure on Dillon's windswept islands. The connection between the fictional child in, and the child reader of, the world of Eilís Dillon's Irish children's novels illustrates the capacity for young adult literature to be an effective means of conveying problematic ideas to a young audience. Eilís Dillon uses the nostalgic realism of her west coast island stories to preserve, while at the same time critique, her native Ireland. This will be analyzed through examination of the interrelationship between the fictional children that provide the narrative voice, the child reader, and the adult author. At the same time this dissertation will discuss Dillon's relationship to her contemporaries and subsequently, her relationship to children's fiction coming out of Ireland. Dillon's nostalgic realism which enhances the image of rural Irish island life is at the heart of what scholars past and present take from Dillon's body of work.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

16

Fanning, David F. "Irish Republican literature 1968-1998 "Standing on the Threshold of Another Trembling World" /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1068495916.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003.
Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 251 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor:, Dept. of. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-245).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

17

Chapman, Bridget M. "Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/117827.

Full text

Abstract:

English
Ph.D.
Regular Wild Irish: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Irish American Fiction examines the ways in which Irish American writers construct "Irishness" in fictional texts which borrow from and respond to literary and cultural discourses in the United States and Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyzes the short fiction and novels of Irish immigrant and Irish American authors writing from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century and particularly focuses on those figures who were publishing in the 1890s. Regular Wild Irish considers the links between the representational strategies used by Irish American writers and broader domestic and international discourses of race and ethnicity in the period. It argues that, while participating in various U.S. literary traditions such as sentimentalism, regionalism, and realism, Irish American writers complicated standard literary and visual representations of Irishness. Regular Wild Irish establishes that Irish American writers mobilized key, if sometimes competing, cultural discourses to shape an image of the American Irish that both engaged with national and transatlantic popular and literary discourses and theorized emergent forms of ethnic and racial identification in the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, Regular Wild Irish demonstrates that if, at the turn into the twenty-first century, Irishness is a "politically insulated" form of ethnic identity fashionable at a moment when white identity seems to be "losing its social purchase," then it is worth thinking seriously about how Irishness was represented at the turn into the twentieth century, when the terms "white" and "Irish" bore a different, if related, set of anxieties than they do today.
Temple University--Theses

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

18

Fairbairn, Hazel. "Group playing in traditional Irish music." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.282816.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

19

Fanning, David Francis. "Irish Republican Literature 1968-1998: “Standing on the Threshold of Another Trembling World”." The Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1068495916.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

20

Bachorz, Stephanie Vanessa. "Dialectics of postcoloniality : Adorno and 20th-century Irish literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.517204.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

21

O'Rawe, Desmond. "Encountering Eros : discourses on desire in contemporary Irish literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.301033.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

22

Shields, Kathleen Mary. "Self and community in recent Irish poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.292222.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

23

Sewell, Frankie. "Extending the Alhambra : four modern Irish poets." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.267793.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

24

Oehling, Richard. "Contemporary Irish Fiction: Lavin and Trevor." W&M ScholarWorks, 1985. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625307.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

25

Eldred, Laura Gail Thornton Weldon. "A brutalized culture the horror genre in contemporary Irish literature /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,81.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.
Title from electronic title page (viewed Oct. 10, 2007). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English." Discipline: English; Department/School: English.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

26

Troeger, Rebecca Louise. "The Formation of Musical Communities in Twentieth Century Irish Literature." Thesis, Boston College, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3837.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes
This dissertation is situated within the opening field of Irish literary and musical interdisciplinary studies and argues that a scholarly focus on the presence of music within Irish literature and culture opens new readings and perspectives. Drawing on cultural studies and musicology, I focus on the musical moment as a limited space during which identities and relationships are dynamically refigured. Through this approach, I look at the formations of communal and individual identities in and through musical performances, the production of gendered identities through music, and musical constructions of memory and the past. The first two chapters of my study deal specifically with the development of gendered identities through musical performance. Chapter 1 focuses on William Butler Yeats' and Augusta Gregory's variations on the trope of the male wandering musician as reflected in their writings on the Galway singer and poet Anthony Raftery, and the effects of Yeats' interest in Raftery on the evolution of his poetic persona, Red Hanrahan. I argue that Raftery, as introduced to Yeats by Lady Gregory, was pivotal to the evolution of Yeats' self-image as a national poet and helped to define his thoughts on poetry as a performed and musical art. Chapter 2 focuses on opera as a venue for an increased range of personal expression for female characters in Joyce. In it, I argue that the strictly disciplined nature of operatic roles allow Julia Morkan of "The Dead" and Molly Bloom of Ulysses a level of agility with gender identity otherwise unavailable to them. Chapter 3 moves from the gendered individual to communal and national identity as reflected in the musical events at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. In it, I argue that the musical performances throughout this event briefly opened a unique social space in which contradictory versions of Irish identity could coexist. Finally, Chapter 4 moves ahead to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing on Roddy Doyle's approaches to communal musical experience, the negotiations of identities through music, and constructions of memory through music in The Commitments and The Guts. Here, I consider the issues of cultural connections and appropriations examined by critics of The Commitments and extend these questions to a reading of The Guts. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai's work on the mobility of cultures and the availability of the past as "raw material" for the present, I argue that The Guts shows how a fraudulent "found" recording of a fictional singer can provide a needed ancestor who articulates a needed narrative of defiance and survival for a 2012 audience
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

27

Cammack, Susanne. "Gramophonic Trauma: The Object as Cultural Mnemonic in Irish Literature." OpenSIUC, 2016. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1192.

Full text

Abstract:

The gramophone's function in literature has generally been examined in relation to media studies and Walter Benjamin's discussion of the reproduction of art through mechanical means, emphasizing the gramophone’s playback of recorded materials. This particular methodology, however, only deals with half of the machine's potential. My project mediates the links between media studies and “thing theory.” By making a distinction between the gramophone as an instrument (through which we access or hear a recording) and the gramophone as a "thing" (an object which draws attention to itself by not behaving as expected, thereby forcing us to confront the object's irreducibility), I trace connections between the physical “thing” as well as its embedded or recorded cultural archives of history, trauma, and identity for Modernist authors and their contemporary audiences. As both a voiced and mute object, the gramophone amplifies embedded accounts of a culture frequently traumatized through violence and disruption; it also bears physical testimony to the scars left behind by those traumatic encounters. My project takes Irish Modernism as its primary focus, and it identifies ways in which the traumas represented by phonograph and gramophone are tied to cultural traumas specific to Ireland. Again to briefly quantify, in my work I discuss (to varying degrees) over 20 Irish texts that evoke the gramophone as an object of some significance and in relation to some aspect of cultural trauma. For instance, in Dracula, the oral traditional of Ireland is under attack by the undead oralities of the phonograph: a machine that presumably preserves living oral culture, is essentially killing what it attempts to preserve. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the gramophone is feminized in the context of gendered colonial politics. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock the machine is imbued with the physical and psychological violence of Ireland at war. And in works like Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Brian Friel’s The Gentle Island the gramophone is a manifestation of post-war tensions—both psychological and political—that can erupt in violence when left unresolved.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

28

Turner, Kerry Lynn. "Pagan Nostalgia and Anti-Clerical Hostility in Medieval Irish Literature." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1008344167.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

29

Horton, Patricia. "Romantic intersections : romanticism and contemporary Northern Irish poetry." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337039.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

30

McMullen, Albert Joseph. "Echoes of Early Irish Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467346.

Full text

Abstract:

This study traces the cultural interplay between Irish and Old English literary landscapes. Combining an ecocritical approach to reading representations of the landscape with a comparatist perspective, each chapter shows that the landscape and the natural world were not only static motifs, but that they allow for the observation of literary influence. The first chapter investigates the political use of the landscape in Irish and Anglo-Saxon saints’ Lives. I argue that the anonymous author of the Life of Cuthbert was following a common Irish hagiographic practice of using place-names to claim churches, monasteries, or lands for the writer’s monastic foundation. Furthermore, Bede was aware of this agenda when he rewrote the Life of Cuthbert some twenty years later and consciously removed many of the place-names that localize Cuthbert’s miracles and ministrations from the text. The second chapter compares the use of the natural world in the Old English Boethius to early Irish cosmological treatises. The Old English translator diverges from Boethius in the amplification of cosmological details (e.g., information about the universe and the elements) that have distinct analogues in early Irish sources. The third chapter examines Grendel’s mere in Beowulf as a reflex of the bog of Germanic pre-Christian worship and as a place which draws on imagery common to insular sources pertaining to hell. Reading the mere as an overlay landscape that places pagan past and Christian present in apposition, I argue that this layered landscape is analogous to landscapes in early Irish poetry and saga. In my final chapter, I explore the paradisiacal landscapes presented in Guthlac A and The Phoenix. These descriptions closely parallel representations of paradise in Irish tradition, especially in contemporaneous Irish poetry. Additionally, like early Irish writers, the Old English poets appropriate the landscape of Eden to reflect and emphasize the spiritual state of the monastic. While scholars have often noted connections between early Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature—though few concerning the representation of the landscape or the natural world—this project is the first study to address the influence of early Irish literary landscapes in Old English works. As such, my dissertation holds the potential to redefine ways of thinking about the transmission of influence between these two early medieval cultures. I show that the landscape and the natural world loomed large in early insular literature in ways that have gone unrecognized, while also providing a model to track the paths of literary influence. My investigations revise the received wisdom about Anglo-Saxon literary landscapes, while contributing to a body of scholarship concerned with connections between early Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England.
Celtic Languages and Literatures

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

31

Maloney, Cahill B. Claire. "Samuel Beckett and the Irish grotesque tradition." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=22606.

Full text

Abstract:

By fusing many of the established hypotheses on the source of the grotesque in Irish literature, this study establishes that these writers' impatience with all boundaries and limitations, physical or mental, led them to exploit the indeterminacy of the grotesque to achieve their particular aesthetic and epistemological objectives.
After an initial chapter on the relevant theoretical and national considerations, the prodigious cloacal visions of Beckett and Joyce are compared, with emphasis on their use of the grotesque to demythologize the creative process. A fourth chapter compares O'Brien's and Beckett's exploitation of the grotesque to undermine hegemonic philosophical and epistemological systems.
Like most writers of the grotesque tradition, Joyce and O'Brien assume a degree of moral responsibility by affirming, explicitly or implicitly, some traditional or utopian values and standards, while Beckett's deliberations on the complex relationship between Nature, the mind and the body end in negation, impotence and the hope of silence.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

32

Corr, Christopher Joseph. "English literary culture and the Irish literary revival : the provenance of the aesthetic of modern Irish literature in English, 1865-1900." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.260997.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

33

McGowan, Pauline Dympna. "Women in Irish prose - early and modern." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.337022.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

34

Lehmann-Shriver, Edyta Anna. "The Power of Words: Female Speech as a Narrative Force in Irish Tales across Centuries." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10430.

Full text

Abstract:

This study is devoted to five Irish language texts composed in the period between 9th and 21st centuries: four prose tales, an Old Irish tale Loinges Mac nUislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu (before 10th c.)), two Middle Irish texts Toruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne (The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne (c. 12thc.)) and Tochmarc Etaine (The Wooing of Etain), an 18th century Romance of Mis and Dubh Ruis, and a narrative poem Mis published by the contemporary Irish poet Biddy Jekinson in 2001. It examines the heroines of these texts, Derdrui, Grainne, Etain, and Mis, focusing particularly on their roles in the development of their respective narratives and their influence on the overall message of their texts. The texts share a strong connection in that they all, in a more or less direct way, touch upon the female experience reflected in their leading female characters, yet none of them, except for Jenkinson's poem, focuses expressly on representing female characters. Instead the texts use these characters as a means for the elaboration of male characters, reinforcing at the same time the contemporaneous patriarchal viewpoint, thus creating the ideological scheme of the text. Jenkinson's Mis reveals the underlying narrative force of these traditional female characters. It uses a traditional tale to create a new narrative which is re-centered on its female character, thus narrativizing its inherent strength. Beneath their explicitly assigned roles, the female characters in question serve as powerful narrative agents. Their impact transforms the overt ideologies of their respective narratives so that they diverge from the traditional role of the conveyors of conventional values. The examination of the female characters concentrates particularly on the effect their speech has on the development of the narrative. Although modestly represented in the discussed texts, the female words nevertheless subvert the explicit ideologies of their text by the introduction of skepticism as to the objective values suggested by the texts, thus allowing for a conversation with the prevalent discourses and in the end for the consideration of alternative discourses. The dissertation employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and heteroglossia, as well as his examination of the Bildungsrom, which allows for the theoretization of the connection between the texts, as well as for their re-interpretation.
Celtic Languages and Literatures

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

35

Pitrone, Barbara A. "Emerging Imagery: The Great Famine in Nineteenth Century Irish Lit." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1377101869.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

36

Bates, Robin E. Relihan Constance Caroline. "Shakespeare and the cultural impressment of Ireland." Auburn, Ala., 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1281.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

37

O, Gallchoir Cliona. "Maria Edgeworth and the rise of national literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313898.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

38

Powell-Pickering, Jessica L. "Warriors, lovers, mothers : women's physical powers in the Irish sagas /." View online, 2008. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211131436233.pdf.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

39

Walsh, Maeve. "Re:vision : the interpretation of history in contemporary Irish drama." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.286613.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

40

Mac, Caba Seamus. "The neutral heart : Irish poetry and World War II." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.307544.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

41

Brearton, Frances Elizabeth. "Creation from conflict : the Great War in Irish poetry." Thesis, Durham University, 1998. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5042/.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis explores the impact of the First World War on the imaginations of six poets - W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley - all of whom have written in wartime: Graves in the Great War, Yeats in the Great War, the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War, MacNeice in the Second World War, Mahon, Longley and Heaney in the Northern Ireland Troubles. The thesis locates affinities between these poets in their response to violence, and compares the ways in which they have imaginatively appropriated the images and events of the Great War to facilitate that response. Part I of this study begins by outlining the historical background to Irish participation in the Great War, and considers some of the issues involved in the Irish cultural response to the war which were engendered by the complex domestic politics in Ireland between 1914 and 1918. Chapters two to four constitute a more detailed exploration of these issues as manifested in the work of Yeats, Graves and MacNeice. In the cases of Yeats and MacNeice, their engagement with the subject of the Great War is re-evaluated in order to illuminate repressed or complex areas of Irish history and culture, and to shed new light on their influence on recent Northern Irish poetry. Consideration of Robert Graves's response to the Great War serves to illustrate the ways in which a high-profile association with the War can obscure relations to an Irish or Anglo-Irish tradition. The thesis discusses ways in which these poets have been misrepresented, and considers how far the misrepresentation can be attributed to the contrasting interpretations of the Great War in England and Ireland, and to versions of literary history based upon these interpretations. The second part of the study concentrates on contemporary Northern Irish poetry. Chapter five considers problems pertinent to Northern Ireland in relation to the subject of the Great War by looking at the ways in which remembrance of the war, politicized in order to bolster mythologies of history, reverberates in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles. The final three chapters outline the difficulties encountered by Northern Irish poets Mahon, Heaney and Longley, under pressure to respond to the Troubles, and relate these difficulties to those encountered by the Great War soldier poets. The chapters explore the extent to which the fascination of these three poets with the Great War illuminates their aesthetic strategies, revises aspects of Irish political and cultural history, offers a way of responding to the violence in Northern Ireland, and has determined critical responses to their work. The thesis is concerned with ways in which the Great War has been imagined in Irish writing. It also shows how and why those imaginings have struggled with, and revised aspects of, reductive mythologies of history and competing versions of the literary canon.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

42

Gillis, A. A. "Awakening constellations : history in Irish poetry of the 1930s." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.390887.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

43

Hassaine, F. "Moore, Joyce and the modernist Anglo-Irish short story." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.372957.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

44

Clark, Lauren. "Modest proposals: Irish children, consumer culture, advertising and literature, 1860-1921." Thesis, University of Sunderland, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.592883.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis examines the role that Irish children fulfilled in an emergent Irish advertising and consumer culture which sought to inculcate them as consumers from 1860 to 1921 . Currently, little research exists in the field of Irish advertising and no scholarly material exists to account for its links to consumer culture and literature in the period following the Famine towards the declaration of Irish independence. A number of approaches have been adopted in this research including research from the area of social history. textual analysis of critically neglected Victorian Irish literature involving children and reading advertisements, archival material and other ephemera in terms of the discourses that they purport to offer. The relation that children had to the consumer culture of Victorian Ire land will be discussed by an examination of mid- to late nineteenth-century Irish fiction, French fiction , anthropological writings, children's school books, magazines and periodicals which featured advertisements. A variety of literature will be scrutinised from the 1860 to 1890 period in particular to provide contesting representations of the child amidst theoretical repositioning and social movements towards child welfare in Ireland. Ultimately my research will demonstrate three factors. Firstly, that Ire land's advertising and consumer culture developed autonomously, in tune with nationalism and Irish national economic development during this period. This constitutes a form of "Celtic Consumerism" also evident in Scotland following the ,-Gaelic Revival and thus, enabled the child to be positioned as the newest participant in a national consumer process. Secondly, thanks to high child literacy rates which outstripped those of mainland Britain, Ireland's children were appealed to as literate consumers in advertising copy and were informed of the perils or benefits of consumer culture in late Victorian Irish literature. Thirdly, I will contend that the role of the child in the marketplace was also a conceit of French fin de siecle fiction and advertising copy that had a considerable impact on childhood in Ireland during this period.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

45

McKeown, Aisling. "The migrant in contemporary Irish literature and film : representations and perspectives." Thesis, University of Westminster, 2013. https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/8z0x4/the-migrant-in-contemporary-irish-literature-and-film-representations-and-perspectives.

Full text

Abstract:

The transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century saw Ireland transformed from a homogeneous emigrant nation into a multi-cultural society. A growing body of contemporary Irish literature and film is engaging with the reality of multi-cultural Ireland and representing the challenges of migrant life from a variety of perspectives. At the same time, these narratives reflect the contradictions, confusions and concerns that define Irish attitudes towards their new migrant communities. The central argument of this thesis is that this new cultural production, whilst interrogating paradigms of national identity, is also adding different perspectives to the Irish literary and cinematic canon. I have chosen to focus on the novel, short story and film genres for their accessibility and potentially wide reach, as well as their tangible and permanent forms. Within my chosen genres, I have selected texts and films by both Irish and migrant writers and filmmakers that represent as diverse a range of perspectives as possible. My close textual analysis of the novels, short stories and films draws on historic Irish literary tradition and in the case of migrant writers, those of their countries of origin, to examine key themes, narrative style and form. More broadly, the research is informed by postcolonial, globalisation and transnational theory, reflecting its anthropological and sociological dimensions. My thesis reveals the impact of migrants on new Irish writing as producers of and protagonists within texts. It outlines changes to the notion of Irish identity, culture and writing as a consequence of immigration. Finally, as a study of a range of narratives that represent the experience of first-generation migrants in twenty-first century Ireland, it constitutes an original contribution to knowledge and provides a benchmark for further research into migrant writing and film of the future.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

46

Matheson, Laura E. "Madness and deception in Irish and Norse-Icelandic sagas." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2015. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=227591.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis explores the representation of mental illness and mental incapacity in medieval Irish and Norse-Icelandic saga literature, with a particular focus on the theme of deception in representations of madness. These texts are compared using the methods of literary close reading. It begins (Chapters 1 and 2) with an overview of concepts of madness found in the two bodies of literature (drawing on law texts and poetry as well as the sagas) and the different narrative uses to which these concepts are put. Some general parallels and contrasts are drawn, and the cross-cultural transmission of the concept of the geilt is discussed in this context. Chapter 3 lays the ground for the thesis's analysis of deception in madness narratives by comparing two Irish and Norse-Icelandic narratives about fools and discussing links between the language of mental impairment and the notion of deception. Chapters 4 and 5 explore narrative representations of how deception is used with the aim of rehabilitating the mad person and reconnecting them with society, focusing in particular on the late Middle Irish saga Buile Shuibhne and an episode in the Icelandic family saga Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Chapter 5 concludes with an extended discussion of the role of poetry and memory in representations of mental illness as seen in these two texts. Chapter 6 explores narratives in which deception is used with the purpose of destroying or humiliating the person of unsound mind, here focusing on the late Middle Irish saga Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca and an episode in the Norwegian king's saga Ágrip.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

47

Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa. "Cultural identity in contemporary Scottish and Irish writing." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1999. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2548/.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

48

Williams, Justine Isabella. "The Irish plays of James Shirley, 1636-1640." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2010. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3933/.

Full text

Abstract:

Although he was a prominent and influential playwright during his theatrical career, the work of James Shirley (1596-1666) has been neglected since Dryden's description of him in 'MacFlecknoe' as a mere 'type...of tautology'. Shirley holds a unique place amongst Caroline dramatists as, at the height of his career, he left London to become resident playwright of the first purpose-built theatre in Ireland, the Werburgh Street Theatre. This seminal event has received fairly little attention from scholars, and the plays of this Irish period (The Royal Master, The Doubtful Heir, The Gentleman of Venice, The Politician and St. Patrick for Ireland) have not previously been examined as a whole. This thesis examines Shirley's Irish period in its entirety, from the circumstances surrounding his move to Dublin in 1636, through an exploration of his relationship with the Werburgh Street Theatre and what influenced his Irish plays, to the factors which resulted in his return to England in 1640. The thesis historicises the production of these plays in their socio-political context. The chapters (chronologically arranged by play) provide close textual studies and contextual material relating the texts to their patrons, performance spaces, audiences, print history and Irish politics. This research reveals that during this four year period, Shirley gradually adapted his writing style in a targeted attempt to appeal to the tastes of the Dublin audience. Shirley managed the theatre with John Ogilby, who was appointed Master of the Revels in Ireland by Lord Deputy Wentworth. An analysis of the relationship between these three key figures has contributed to a comprehensive picture of the socio-political conditions of Shirley‘s writing. Through the investigation of Shirley's work and professional position during this time, this thesis builds on recent critical recovery work (including that by Hadfield/Maley, Rankin, Dutton) on the literary-political circumstances of Stuart Ireland.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

49

Bradley, Kristen A. "A Tennessee Irish Picnic| Foodways and Complex Community Dynamics." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3622924.

Full text

Abstract:

St. Patrick's Irish Picnic and Homecoming is a barbecue event held every July in the small town of McEwen, Tennessee, located just west of Nashville. Each year, volunteers for the event barbecue 20,000 pounds of pork shoulder and 4,000 chicken halves. With its massive size, the event is the primary fundraiser for St. Patrick's Church and School, and as such holds great importance within the community. A Tennessee Irish Picnic examines the history, culture, and folklore of the event, analyzing it as it fits within the larger context of barbecue in the American South. Utilizing archival research and interviews with event volunteers and St. Patrick's parishioners, the author's ethnographic approach reveals many similarities between the event and the overarching cultural narrative of barbecue. In other ways, however, the event stands in alternative to these interpretations. Although cultural depictions of barbecue portray the foodway as a marginalizing experience between north and south, female and male, white and black, primitive and civilized, an investigation of the narrative on a smaller scale reveals the complexities of the foodway as a mark of community history and group and personal identities. The event becomes important not only on a financial level, but also in terms of understanding community dynamics.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

50

Campbell, Alexandra. "Archipelagic poetics : ecology in modern Scottish and Irish poetry." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9102/.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis examines a range of poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland from the Modernist period to the present day, who take the relationship between humans, poetry and the natural world as a primary point of concern. Through precise, materially attentive engagements with the coastal, littoral, and oceanic dimensions of place, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Moya Cannon, Mary O’Malley and Jen Hadfield, respectively turn towards the vibrant space of the Atlantic archipelago in order to contemplate new modes of relation that are able to contend with the ecological and political questions engendered by environmental crises. Across their works, the archipelago emerges as a physical and critical site of poetic relation through which poets consider new pluralised, devolved, and ‘entangled’ relationships with place. Derived from the geographic term for ‘[a]ny sea, or sheet of water, in which there are numerous islands’, the concept of the ‘archipelago’ has recently gained critical attention within Scottish and Irish studies due to its ability to re-orientate the critical axis away from purely Anglocentric discourses. Encompassing a range of spatial frames from bioregion to biosphere, islands to oceans, and temporal scales from deep pasts to deep futures, the poets considered here turn to the archipelago as a means of reckoning with the fundamental questions that the Anthropocene poses about the relationships between humans and the environment. Crucially, through a series of comparative readings, the project presents fresh advancements in ecocritical scholarship, with regards to the rise of material ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the ‘Blue Humanities’.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Irish literature'

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles