The modern Irish Bildungsroman: a narrative of resistance and deformation

PR English literature

Mansouri, Shahriyar ; Kolocotroni, Vassiliki

University:University of Glasgow

Department:School of Critical Studies

关键词: PR English literature;   

Others  :  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5495/1/2014MansouriPhD.pdf

来源: University of Glasgow

【 摘 要 】

My thesis examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern IrishBildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ in the form ofsocio-cultural, psychological, personal and notably political artefacts present in thenation’s unfortunate engagement with the State’s politics of formation. The result is aresistant and radical form which challenges the classical and modern specificity of thegenre by introducing a non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonist, whose antitheticalperception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts ofthe post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, thisthesis focuses on Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), Dermot Bolger’s TheWoman’s Daughter (1987), William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002),Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark (1996), Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy(1992), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls(1960) and A Pagan Place (1970), Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996),Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life (1961),and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965). The selected novels provide an invaluableinsight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism andmodern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produced a criticaldialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistoricalmodern protagonist. To achieve a historical relevance, this thesis starts by examiningDoyle’s fictionalization of 1916 Easter Rising and the chaotic 1920s; Bolger’sexploration of a repressive, inward-looking post-independence Irish society in the1930s and the 1940s; Trevor’s engagement with a socio-political divide that furthersplit the nation; Deane’s autogenous reading of an internal neocolonial ‘Othering’during the ‘emergency’; McCabe’s illustration of the State’s architecture ofoppression, and societal introversion from the early 1940s to the 1960s; EdnaO’Brien’s and Nuala O’Faolain’s exemplary illustration of women’s blighted sexualBildung in the 1940s, 50s and 60s; and finally examining a radical, ‘chronocentric’depiction of a socio-political divide fictionalized by Stuart and McGahern, whichemerged during the early days of the State and continued to dominate the nation wellinto the 1960s and the early 1970s. By examining psycho-social, sexual and politicaltraumata reflected in the modern Irish Bildungsroman, this thesis provides adialectical reading of the gap that appeared between the revolutionary ethos of independent Irish identity formation, rooted in the principles of 1916 Rising and the1920s, and that which appeared in the form of a tolerant republicanism in the 1980s.To study this socio-historical gap, I examine the nation’s criticism of the State’spolitics and structure of formation, manifested in narratives of individual and nationalformation. The modern Irish Bildungsroman, I argue, appropriates the traditionalfeatures of the genre, for instance, chronicling the individual’s psychosocial formationand the potential to re-engage with their society, and produces a critical matrix for adialectical discourse which enables the nation to voice their concerns vis-à-vis apolitically dichotomous post-independence Irish society, a repressed history, and atthe same time to externalize their perception of modern Irish formation, beingfounded on an anti-colonial, non-conservative and politically aware consciousness.The result, which I call the ‘Meta-National Narrative of Formation,’ is a historicallyresistant and socio-politically conscious narrative which finds independence inrejection, imposition, and deformation, namely, by defying the State’s architecture offormation as well as their nativist, retrograde visions of Irish identity.