English - Doctoral Theses
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Item Absences & Presences: towards a Detective Gothic(University College Cork, 2024) Connolly, John; Walshe, Eibhear; Denton, DannyAbsences & Presences: Towards a Detective Gothic comprises two main sections. The first, extending from pp.6-193, is a critical/ biographical study that discusses various literary, cultural and social influences on my writing, the validity of ‘Detective Gothic’ as a descriptor for my work, and defends my fiction’s engagement with the uncanny, an engagement that runs counter to traditional thinking about the rationalist roots of the mystery genre. The second section, pp 194–281, is the creative component, consisting of three short stories that draw upon some of the ideas and themes arising out of the critical/biographical section and the research for my earlier critical anthology Shadow Voices. The introduction to that volume forms part of the supporting material in the Appendices, in addition to a draft of my essay on Irish crime fiction for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Irish Novel (which draws on my academic research), and one further short story originally intended for the creative section but excised for reasons of length. The critical section contains eight chapters. Chapters I and II examine the Irish literary, cultural, and political factors that influenced, directly or indirectly, my formation as a writer, with reference to the career of the Irish detective writer M. McDonnell Bodkin. Chapter III looks at British crime fiction, principally mysteries of the twentieth century’s ‘Golden Age’, and how it reflects a particular mode of thinking about criminality and its victims. The chapter also sets that thinking against my personal experiences as a journalist, which fed into the conceptions of law and justice subsequently explored in my novels. Chapter IV contrasts the British approach to crime writing with the American, and includes critical examinations of two key Ross Macdonald texts, leading into a discussion of Macdonald as a Gothic novelist. Chapter V expands upon this discussion to consider the hauntological elements of Macdonald’s work and how those elements also arise in my fiction. Chapter VI returns the focus to Irish writing, using Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu as a starting point for a discussion of the supernatural, occult, and horror in crime fiction, and how their presence may run contrary to orthodox assumptions about the genre. Chapter VII continues this theme but focuses on hybrid modes of writing, tracing a path from Le Fanu and Uncle Silas to my novels, and arguing that the combination of detection and the Gothic in my work marks it as both distinctly Irish and faithful to the origins of the genre. Finally, Chapter VIII considers the influence of childhood OCD on my writing, as well as the connection between fairy tales and the Gothic, and how that connection manifests in my novels and short fiction. N.B.: I have elected to capitalise ‘Gothic’ throughout for consistency, though when quoting from other sources I have not capitalised where lower case is used.Item Whitman, Ginsberg, and the Long Line(University College Cork, 2023) Sabbadin, Elisa; Jenkins, Lee; Allen, Graham; Irish Research CouncilThis thesis explores Walt Whitman’s long lines, Allen Ginsberg’s long lines, and the line of the long line in American poetry. As a frame of reference for the long line, the thesis discusses open form. Whitman and Ginsberg did more than herald the first and the second free verse revolutions: they initiated and promulgated the tradition of open form – organicism, in Whitman’s early term. Their long lines were a conscious stylistic choice, shaped so as to encode domains which extended beyond form: politics, society, and, above all, spirituality. Or was it perhaps the other way around: that in exploding the constraints of poetic content, these poets accordingly shaped the long line? This thesis explores the long line in various senses: in its implications, origins, and, crucially, in the exchanges which occur, in Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s poetry, between form, content, and meaning. The long line emerges as a form in which surface boasts meaning, and through which the meaning which moulded it may be glimpsed; as a place of playfulness and contradiction, at least in the hands of Whitman and Ginsberg, perhaps the two most playful and contradictory American poets; and as a phenomenon both carefully crafted and, simultaneously, wild at heart. Just as Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s personas and personalities were larger than life, the long line is larger than the page: it is a line that hungers, eats, digests, expels, unravels, fertilises, orgasms, dissolves, evades, and merges. As the democratic Romantic and the democratic Beat were ‘everyone’s poets,’ the long line is also appropriately an ‘everything line’: it adds, includes, transforms, eludes, overcomes boundaries, embodies organicity, and multiplies its layers. However, this thesis shows that, in spite of its break with conventional form and its ostensible formlessness, Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s long line is solidly built – take Ginsberg’s description of Howl as “really built like a brick shithouse” (Morgan 133). Far from being a formless representation of formless concepts, the long line is an informed formal choice. The long line is a largely unnoticed form, and one which has received scant scholarly attention. This thesis elevates the long line as the premise of an underground American poetics which employs it as a socially and spiritually charged medium, and complements the formal tradition of the long line with attention to an alternative critical tradition which, in particular in Ginsberg’s case, accompanies its emergence and development. Whereas close reading has been traditionally associated with apolitical ways of reading, and extra-literary contexts have been effaced by formalist traditions, this thesis explores how form informs, shapes, and embodies content, showing that poetic form is inherently political.Item Fiction and travel writing in Ireland, 1750-1840(University College Cork, 2023) Nakamura, Tetsuko; Connolly, Claire; O Gallchoir, ClionaThis 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.Item Things in time: a digital synchronic analysis of manuscript newsletters (1575-76)(University College Cork, 2023) Kreuze, Wouter; Dooley, Brendan; Cosgrave, Michael; Irish Research CouncilThe 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.Item Analysing Irish accents on the contemporary screen: historical contexts and throughlines to the present(University College Cork, 2022) O'Riordan, Nicholas; Monahan, BarryAgainst a history of perceived misrepresentation of Ireland and the Irish in literature and theatre, academic discourses around the nation on screen have frequently evaluated the accuracy of these depictions. Such assessments have tended to focus on how the on-screen image of Ireland is shaped, and specifically how it looks. The current thesis shifts this focus, and offers an in-depth consideration of how the country sounds on screen. Colonial and foreign representations of the Irish were once characterised by a specific style of accent employment that tended to infantilise, essentialise, and ‘other’ Irish characters through their voices. This was often achieved in the form of ‘eye dialect’, where a character’s speech is explicitly marked as non-standard through variations in spelling. The introduction of the voice to cinema offered the previously silent medium a recorded and permanent aural manifestation of the types of linguistic representation that had already been commonplace on the stage and the page for hundreds of years. Outside of academia, public commentary online around representations of Ireland and the Irish abounds with criticisms and complaints about depictions of the Irish accent, often perceived as inaccurate, exaggerated, and stereotypical. The current project both explores the historical growth of, and motivations behind, such complaints, and also tracks their enduring evolution to contemporary criticisms of the Irish accent on screen. It proposes that there are historical and political motivations (nationalism, protectionism, and desires for cultural autonomy) for the intense critical reaction to the perceived misrepresentations. By interrogating the concept of accent as a social phenomenon, this project deconstructs essentialist considerations of standard and non-standard accents, and also offers a structuralist methodological framework for approaching accent. It suggests that the Irish accent, on the street or on the screen, should only be adjudicated and analysed in relation to the context of the speech act, the background of the speaker, and the relative experience and knowledge of the listener. Addressing textual uses of accent, a considerable part of the methodological and conceptual project involves the construction of a taxonomy. Focusing on moments in which there is a marked, or meaningful employment of accent, it considers what these moments are doing in the context of each film. This thesis ultimately proposes four main categories of accent use and thus, results in a categorisation of cinematic accents in Irish cinema.