http://hdl.handle.net/10468/61 2017-10-29T10:13:14Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/3842 Counting on the past: Yeats and Irish romanticism Connolly, Claire 2017-07-14T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4705 Green fields and blue roads: The melancholy of the girl walker in Irish women’s fiction O'Connor, Maureen Lawrence Buell has observed that ‘Ecology as green … perpetuates the implication of binary nature-culture separation … and understates the potential for self-intoxicated fetishization of greenery’. The fetishization of greenery has unique connotations for cultural production in Ireland, a country inevitably identified with the colour and with romanticized landscapes. This essay will examine the establishment and maintenance of the myth of ‘natural’ and pure womanhood, a fetishized commodity central to constructions of twentieth-century Irishness, as represented in novels by three contemporary writers, Clare Boylan, Edna O’Brien, and Éilís Ní Dhuinhne. The discussion will focus on the figure of the girl walking through the Irish landscape, a setting against which the girl appears both as a ‘natural’ reproductive resource to be cultivated for exploitation and as an embodiment of the contradictions subtending her position caught between ideas of the cultural and the natural. These Irish women’s texts, to borrow Joe Kennedy’s phrase, ‘puncture the pastoral’, often by complicating notions of the countryside as retreat and haven, a challenge with implications for women’s place in imagining Irish national identity. The girls’ relationship to the landscape through which they travel is a traumatised one. At once captured and troubled by their own reduction to the ‘natural’, their valuation as reproductive resource, they are drawn to the ‘green’ world, even as they recognise the dangers it represents. 2017-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/3915 The unity of Edmund Spenser's Complaints Roy, David Karl Edmund Spenser's Complaints (1591) is a collection of nine poems; these poems are compartmentalized into four sections, each of which begins with its own frontispiece and contains a dedication to a lady. Complaints is an extremely problematic volume which prompts urgent questions, not hitherto adequately addressed, such as: How can Complaints be defined in terms of form, genre and structure? Is Complaints simply a collection of four separate pamphlets? Why does the volume not fit into any of the career trajectories proposed for Spenser? Why is fixing a date on the poems so difficult? Why is the authorship of the preface, entitled ‘The Printer the Gentle Reader’, so hard to define? Complaints has been regarded as a haphazard collection, thrown together by the publisher to capitalize on the success of the first part of The Faerie Queene (1590). The aims of this thesis are to address the above questions, while also arguing for the thematic, bibliographic, structural, numerological, cosmological and contextual unity found in the volume, and teasing out the implications of these various unities. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4890 The bestial feminine in Finnegans Wake Lovejoy, Laura Female characters frequently appear as animals in the unstable universe of James Joyce’s a Finnegans Wake. What Kimberly Devlin terms “the male tendency to reduce women to the level of the beast” is manifest in Finnegans Wake on a large scale. From the hen pecking at a dung heap which we suppose is a manifestation of matriarch Anna Livia Plurabelle, to the often lascivious pig imagery (reminiscent of Bloom’s experience with brothel-keeper Bella in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses) associated with juvenile seductress Issy, the lines between animal and human are frequently blurred when it comes to representing the feminine in the Wake. As scholars such as Devlin have highlighted, such constellations of images have their roots in blatantly misogynistic iconographies. Indeed, the reinscription of female characters into bestial roles in the Wake echoes a religious history of the dehumanisation of women. Yet, while this gendered representational tendency has been noted in Joycean and, more recently, wider modernist studies, its deployment and impact as a cultural and literary trope has not yet been interpreted according to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts which shaped the composition of Finnegans Wake. In particular, the culturally-specific sexual politics of Free State Ireland (1922–1937), against which Joyce arguably pushes throughout the entirety of the Wake, offer a suggestive lens through which to view the text’s interconnected representations of the feminine and the bestial. This article suggests that, in Finnegans Wake, the nonhuman is a mode through which Joyce explores the fraught sexual politics of early twentieth-century Ireland. Specifically, the bestial feminine becomes an avenue to inspect, expose, and satirise prevalent contemporary fears over female sexual licentiousness and national moral decline. Historicising the text’s grappling with themes of carnality and baseness, the article discusses the ways in which the woman-as-animal is deployed in Finnegans Wake as a grotesque symbol of an unbridled and threatening female sexuality—an extreme embodiment of 1920s and 1930s Ireland’s worst fears surrounding the perceived degeneration of Irish women’s modesty. Unearthing the Wake’s social contexts in order to interpret its sexual politics, this article ultimately asks whether the trope of the woman-as-animal stages a complete resistance against the conservatism of early twentieth-century Ireland’s sexual politics, or whether Joyce’s invocation of a historically misogynistic and patriarchal construction risks reinforcing the dehumanisation of women, moving the text’s sexual politics further away from the liberatory 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z