English - Doctoral Theses

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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/172

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Fiction and travel writing in Ireland, 1750-1840
(University College Cork, 2023) Nakamura, Tetsuko; Connolly, Claire; O Gallchoir, Cliona
This thesis aims to show the complex relationship between fiction and travel writing from the middle of the eighteenth century to the eve of the Great Famine. My examination of the intertextuality between novels and travel books including geographical publications and guidebooks reveals how fiction writers drew on travel writing and how travel writing evolved based on geographical descriptions. Two authors of national tales in particular, Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, are critical of the travel narratives produced by British travellers to Ireland, and their resistance to these narratives is woven into their works. Edgeworth attaches great importance to eastward travel to Britain, in contrast to the focus on westward journeys conducted by the British travellers, while Owenson effectively uses travel writing texts in her novels to represent her Irish view of nation-building. Owenson’s fictional narrative of travel along the northern coast of Ireland in turn affects Anne Plumptre’s narrative of her Irish travels. Another focus of this thesis is the representation of specific locations where fiction and non-fiction travel narratives, as well as informative descriptions in travel books, are interrelated. Targets of discussion are Dublin as the gateway to Ireland and two Irish places, St Patrick’s Purgatory and Cong. Dublin is represented as a place of encounter where social and political tensions connect travellers and locals, and accounts of travel to this metropolis as a border crossing are also viewed in this context. The Irish places attracted growing attention as tourist destinations from around the time of Catholic Emancipation, and my textual examination of fiction and non-fiction travel narratives shows the writers’ increasing interest in writing about the process of travel.
Things in time: a digital synchronic analysis of manuscript newsletters (1575-76)
(University College Cork, 2023) Kreuze, Wouter; Dooley, Brendan; Cosgrave, Michael; Irish Research Council
The development of a news culture in early modern Europe profoundly affected the perception of time. Because political conceptions are generally understood to be historically rooted, this also affected the way in which political identities and unities were defined. I have therefore analysed and described the news network as it functioned within one moment in time using two different collections. This description has been made for the timeframe 1575-76, as for these years the archival documents have been well-preserved and coincide with an important political event in Genoa that is symptomatic for how the news system functioned. As the principal news genre of the sixteenth century the manuscript newsletter (or avviso) was created according to certain formal and textual properties that defined it as a genre. Its very recognizable lay-out, repeated in every document, divided material into separate header sections consisting of different news items per paragraph. This makes the avviso very suitable for collection in digital repositories and relatively easy to submit to a digital analysis. The analysis carried out here has been able to clarify that most avvisi came from a handful of locations where they appeared with regular intervals. That these really were continuous serials, is shown by the fixed weekdays on which they were usually published. Furthermore, authors writing from the same location seem to have relied on the same sources as testified by the many similarities between the series. This further proves that we are dealing with a proper news network that was impersonal and international. The writing style of the manuscript newsletters can be characterised as descriptive and devoid of embellishments. Yet, in the sixteenth century, news writing was often considered a questionable practice, as it had the reputation of spreading lies. Speculative accounts, furthermore, were seen as an eschatological hazard. That might explain the descriptive writing style and the avvisi’s apparently sympathetic stance towards Catholic causes. That is not to say that the world was regarded from the standpoint of universal values alone. News was probably more than anything an enumeration of particular events. That comes even more to the fore where the news was placed within its historical context. The prime example here is the Republic of Genoa, that was represented as not existing universally and perennially but as moving between key moments in its constitutional history. Having said that, Catholic world views are clearly deeply interwoven in the fabric of the news system. The texts often spoke in terms of ‘ours’ whenever discussing Catholic forces fighting Protestants or Muslims. The newsletters in general had a bias favouring ‘the Catholic kings’ of Spain, who were perceived as being more supportive of the Catholic cause. The Republic of Genoa was perceived as being part of this Catholic world order just as much as other states. There does appear to be a tendency, however, to see the party that did not enjoy the sympathy of most avviso writers, in this case the Genoese nuovi, as lacking in Catholic fervour. We can conclude therefore that in the second half of the sixteenth century, newsletters, notwithstanding their descriptive writing style, spoke with a distinct, especially Catholic, voice. By regularly dispatching news, they harnessed a distinct Catholic identity and created a community of readers. The news, however, was by its very nature transnational and reported upon what happened in remote areas. Its main purpose was to make particular events known to the public, not to communicate universal values. Therefore, it appears that the system was already inclined to the integration of areas with different confessional backgrounds, although this development began to gain momentum only around the year 1600.
Heron: a novel
(University College Cork, 2023) Feeney, Robert; Walshe, Eibhear; Davis, Alex; Corcoran, Miranda; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
‘But remember that here all is enchantment, that you have fallen under the spell of the dead, that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into emptiness and silence’ - from Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: An Interpretation (1904) Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote this in the year of his death. By that time, he had written a number of books about Japan, including "Kwaidan", a collection of traditional ghost stories. Hearn's work was heralded as translating the East for the West, but also criticised for its idealised view of Japan. Hearn lived there for thirteen years, taught English at Tokyo Imperial University, married a woman from a noble family and had children. However, quotes such as the one above suggest that he was not entirely comfortable in his adopted home. The creative thesis explores, through the means of a historical novel, the idea that his troubled state of mind stemmed from his eventful upbringing in Dublin and abroad. Left in the care of his great-aunt at age seven, half-blinded at sixteen in a playground accident, expelled and impoverished in Cincinnati at nineteen; the novel looks at the ghosts of Hearn's past and how they haunted his life in Japan. The critical thesis also examines these familial ghosts, using a close reading of one of Hearn’s stories (‘Yuko: A Reminiscence’) to discuss three themes pertinent to his writing and his past. A record of creative practice notes the influence of that story on the novel Heron and details the novel’s construction through a chronological account of its influences, obstacles and the forms of its various drafts, from first to last.
Performing women’s poetry: an evolving craft
(University College Cork, 2023) Manning, Maria Hanora; Jenkins, Lee; Hanna, Adam; Irish Research Council
This research project proposes to examine a current cohort of female poets employing performance techniques in their poetries, investigating how these poets continue to adapt and adopt the aesthetics of earlier poets. In recent years, the popularity of poetry in online communities has boomed, with an inevitable backlash to this poetic movement, criticising its contribution to poetry as a cultural form, such as Rebecca Watts’ PN Review article. Throughout this research, I aim to locate these poetries (often described as “digital” or “e- poetries”) along a continuum of performance, identifying the ways in which such a factor is evoked in both these new works and the work of earlier poets. Bearing in mind the theories John Miles Foley’s book Oral Literature and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind, which suggests the internet is a natural evolution of oral literature and spoken word poetries, I aim to connect the work of this cohort of poets with performance poets before them, examining the performative overlaps between oral and digital literatures. This project will interrogate the ways in which performance is enacted through a number of guises, from the sounds of orality and musicality, to the embodiment of performance by these poets. I aim to examine the creation of an aesthetic of performance among these women poets, paying particular attention to the ways the female body is performed in this work. Finally, I consider the social implications and contexts of such work, exploring the connections between poet and audience, the poetic persona and the performance of politics in these poetries. My research is primarily focused on work of poets disseminating their work chiefly through non-print methods, such as recording, performance, and social media, in the 21st Century. I will also examine the performance poetries of women poets in the 20th Century, examining the connections and creation ofa performance aesthetic, aiming to link the work of poets across these eras by examining a series of aspects of their poetics, such as the orality, the body, musicality, social engagement and public spheres of poetry.
Finding oneself far from home: identity construction in contemporary US migrant women’s fiction
(University College Cork, 2020-04) Alghamdi, Khlwd; Jenkins, Lee
This thesis discusses US immigrant women’s narratives in terms of identity construction, adaptation to the host environment, and the resulting effects on the characters’ sense of home and belonging. The thesis also compares women’s immigrant narratives with expatriate fictions focusing on the experience of American women in the East. The project explores six specific novels: Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arabian Jazz (1993), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2009), Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Keija Parssinen’s The Ruins of Us (2012), and Janice Y. K. Lee’s The Expatriates (2016). These texts will be examined primarily through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theories of postcolonial ‘third space’ and hybridity, and Young Yun Kim’s cross-cultural adaptation theory. The thesis also engages with the extant scholarship on this topic. The goal of this thesis is to bridge a gap in the fields of literary and cross-cultural studies, immigrant women studies, and comparative studies, generating scholarship on neglected topics such as women’s expatriate narratives in the East. This project connects the women writers discussed through the theories applied in interpreting their narratives and through identifying them according to two, different, geographical movements—immigration into America and emigration to the East. The first cluster of narratives explored in this thesis are those of migrant women who struggle with double exclusion: a woman of colour who migrates to the US experiences twice the difficulties that a man of colour or an expatriated White women to the East would face. However, American women who migrate to the East also struggle with loss of autonomy due to cultural difference and differences in gender roles in the host culture. As American literature is now routinely defined as a phenomenon that exceeds national borders, looking at the works of the immigrant women writers discussed in this thesis through the lens of the transnational turn in American studies changes and challenges our definition of what American literature is.

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