Browsing by Subject "Irish literature"
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Item 'Ere their story die' : the rhetoric of historical responsibility in Sebastian Barry's A long, long way(2011-05) Demott, Elizabeth Susan; Cullingford, ElizabethThree important Irish texts use revelations about Irish involvement in the First World War as a lens through which to examine contemporary Ireland: Jennifer Johnston’s novel How Many Miles To Babylon (1974), Frank McGuinness’s play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), and Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way (2005). Because significant critical attention has been paid to the texts of Johnston and McGuinness, and because access to Barry’s archive in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas further illuminates the process by which Barry represents this crucial moment in Irish history, his novel is the focus of this paper. Unlike Johnston and McGuinness, whose projects use the First World War to interrogate the Ireland in which they are writing and force the reader to grapple with their own historically (or mythically) constructed identities, Barry’s A Long, Long Way denies personal culpability and allows for a view of history in which the individual stands forever as a tragic or pathetic victim. Barry’s novel details the experiences of one Irish soldier, Willie Dunne, on the Western Front and plots his changing attitude towards Irish soldiers’ involvement in the War following the Easter 1916 Rising. Exposed to both nationalist and loyalist perspectives, and to the horrors of war, Willie increasingly develops sympathy with the nationalist position, though he never abandons his principal loyalty to his father. While Willie’s narrative presents a more complicated vision of the Dunne family—Barry’s ancestors who have figured prominently in his oeuvre—it fails to escape the tragic impulse in much of Barry’s fiction, in which history is an immovable and oftentimes malevolent force. Such a vision of history allows individuals like Willie Dunne to disavow responsibility for their personal fate and for their roles within a larger Irish history.Item National family allegory: Irish men and post-independence novels and film(2009-05-15) Trayers, Shane NicoleThis dissertation explores the ideological functions of the National Family Allegory in post-Independence novels and film created by male authors and film directors. Ideology functions as a lingering force in service of the status quo, the current power structure, and these works recreate the same family structures as those established during colonization and through national myth. The roles of Mother Ireland, savior sons, and failing fathers repeat, sometimes through creative means. Although the texts attempt to subvert the allegory, many post-Independence works eventually show the traditional and conservative family structure of the National Family Allegory. The first chapter, ?Importantly Motherless: Spontaneous Child Creation and Male Maternity,? analyzes the connection between the missing Mother figure and male fantasies of pregnancy and child creation. Because of the lack of stable family structure, usually connected to early childhood abandonment or mistreatment, the novels discussed in this chapter show the absolute necessity of family in creating a personal and national identity. In the second chapter, ??You Can?t Protect Your Women??: Male Irish Terrorists as Protector in Popular American and Irish Films, 1984-1998,? the young man/son protagonist in his role as protector of the woman/Mother figure is analyzed in six different films. In the third chapter, ?Articulation and Stasis: The Son as Haunted Echo of the Father in McCann?s Songdogs,? discusses the father and son dynamic in relation to the missing mother in this diasporic novel to indicate that the Irish National Family Allegory holds true even during the dispersion of post-Famine Irish identity. The last chapter, ?Failing Fathers,? examines the father figure in Roddy Doyle?s A Star Called Henry, Patrick McCabe?s The Butcher Boy, and John McGahern?s Amongst Women. A father?s traditional role is to function in the public sphere and also to control the family, yet each of these father?s fail in their roles, which is typical of the National Family Allegory role established within the literature.Item “Quality is everything” : rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement in interwar women’s literature of England, Ireland and the United States(2009-12) Craig, Allison Layne; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Cloud, Dana; Carter, Mia; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Wilks, Jennifer MThis dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.Item Radio texts : the broadcast drama of Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard(2010-08) Jesson, James Roslyn; Friedman, Alan Warren; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Kackman, Michael; Loehlin, James; Richmond-Garza, ElizabethRadio drama developed as a genre as new media proliferated and challenged the cultural primacy of print. The methods of production and distribution and the literary genres that developed during the age of print provided models for radio playwrights to follow but also cultural forces for them to challenge. This dissertation considers these dual influences of print on the radio drama of four playwrights: Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. Each playwright “remediates” the printed page in radio plays by adapting or evoking the form of various literary texts, including novels (Welles), travel writing (Thomas), diaries and transcribed speech (Beckett), and historical writing (Stoppard). By representing written texts in an electronic, primarily oral medium, these authors examined the status of literary expression in an age of ascendant electronic media. Welles’s The War of the Worlds and Huckleberry Finn, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and other broadcasts, Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and Embers, and Stoppard’s In the Native State highlight defining features of the print tradition and reveal how practices of writing and “reading” changed in the radio environment. These plays suggest that radio prompted writers to reconsider the literary author’s creative role, the text’s stability, and the audience’s interaction with the work. “Radio Texts” ultimately argues, therefore, that radio drama’s significance transcends its place in media history and dramatic criticism; the works I examine also point to radio plays’ important role in authors’ re-evaluation of literary expression in a changing twentieth-century media ecology.