Using a sociolinguistic and post-colonial approach, I analyze Irish dramas that speak about language and its connection to national identity. In order to provide a systematic and wide-ranging study, I have selected plays written at approximately fifty-year intervals and performed before Irish audiences contemporary to their writing. The writers selected represent various aspects of Irish society--religiously, economically, and geographically--and arguably may be considered the outstanding theatrical Irish voices of their respective generations. Examining works by Alicia LeFanu, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel, I argue that the way each of these playwrights deals with language and identity demonstrates successful resistance to the destruction of Irish identity by the dominant language power. The work of J. A. Laponce and Ronald Wardhaugh informs my language dominance theory. Briefly, when one language pushes aside another language, the cultural identity begins to shift. The literature of a nation provides evidence of the shifting perception. Drama, because of its performance qualities, provides the most complex and complete literary evidence. The effect of the performed text upon the audience validates a cultural reception beyond what would be possible with isolated readers. Following a theoretical introduction, I analyze the plays in chronological order. Alicia LeFanu's The Sons of Erin; or, Modern Sentiment (1812) gently pleads for equal treatment in a united Britain. Dion Boucicault's three Irish plays, especially The Colleen Bawn (1860) but also Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1875), satirically conceal rebellious nationalist tendencies under the cloak of melodrama. W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899) reveals his romantic hope for healing the national identity through the powers of language. However, The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) reveal an increasing distrust of language to mythically heal Ireland. Brian Friel's Translations (1980), supported by The Communication Cord (1982) and Making History (1988), demonstrates a post-colonial move to manipulate history in order to tell the Irish side of a British story, constructing in the process an Irish identity that is postnational.

In my kennismaking met die poësie van Yeats en Roland Holst het ek onvermydelik opgemerk dat hulle sekere simbole ooreenkomstig gebruik, dat hulle dieselfde hoë, aristokratiese waardes handhaaf en gevolglik 'n afkeer het van die moderne massa-demokrasieë. Later het ek ontdek dat albei digters sterk in die Keltiese mites en sages belang gestel het en dat Roland Holst Yeats as 'n belangrike invloed eien. Dit alles, en die feit dat hulle albei enkele gegewens uit die Griekse mitologie daarby voeg in wat hulle "mites" word, het my voorgekom as goeie rede vir 'n vergelykende studie. So 'n ideë-studie het egter gedreig om iets heel anders te word as die literêre beskouing wat ek beoog het. Geleidelik het dit egter geblyk dat die mite méér moet wees dan die ideë-sisteem; en juis dit waardeur die mite meer is dan ideë-sisteem het die belangrikste regverdiging geword vir 'n vergelykende studie, en terselfdertyd, vir 'n toespitsing van die aandag op die poësie.

Au début du XXe siècle, la scène européenne est marquée par une recherche de nouvelles formes d’expression théâtrale, qui coïncide avec un refus du matérialisme. Le Sublime comme conscience de la dignité humaine, tel qu’il fut défini par Schiller, prend de l’importance : rempart face au changement perpétuel qui caractérise la condition humaine, le Sublime devient solidaire d’une conscience de l’Histoire et confère à l’homme une part infime d’éternité. Les efforts de W. B. Yeats pour fonder une communauté irlandaise à l’Abbey Theatre, de Max Reinhardt et de Hugo v. Hofmannsthal pour donner naissance au Festival de Salzbourg, mais aussi le projet de Romain Rolland d’un « Théâtre du Peuple », ou encore le théâtre de Richard Beer-Hofmann qui vise à réunir les individus par la mémoire d’un passé commun, manifestent la mission attribuée au théâtre. Les quatre auteurs donnent une réponse aux forces destructrices de leur temps en créant un théâtre de la dignité humaine où l’héroïsme sublime subit une métamorphose grâce à une nouvelle valeur : la compassion. L’imagination qui la rend possible devient essentielle à la dramaturgie du Sublime. Étudié en tant que principe philosophique et dramaturgique, le Sublime révèle alors sa filiation avec l’opéra et le mélodrame. Leurs interférences, déjà présentes chez Schiller, témoignent de la volonté d’élever les spectateurs au-dessus du quotidien grâce à une dramaturgie visionnaire fondée sur l’aspiration à une réalité supérieur. / European drama at the beginning of the 20th century was in search of new forms of artistic expression. In this context which coincides with the rejection of materialism, the Sublime as consciousness of human dignity gained in importance. A bulwark against the perpetual and inevitable succession of human life, the Sublime as defined by Schiller more than a century earlier attained equality with the awareness of History, lending to humankind an element of eternity. The efforts of W.B. Yeats to restore a sense of Irish community at the Abbey Theatre, those of Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal who created the Salzburg Festival, but also Romain Rolland’s project of a « People’s Theatre » as well as Richard Beer-Hofmann’s plays which integrated the memory of the past, all reveal the reconciliatory function newly conferred on drama. These four authors found an answer to the destructive forces of their time by creating a drama of human dignity in which sublime heroism shifts through compassion. Its source, imagination, plays an essential role in the dramaturgy of the Sublime. The examination of the Sublime as a philosophical and dramatic principle elucidates its relationship to both opera and melodrama. The overlapping of genres can already be noticed in Schiller’s plays and proves the intention of raising the audience above the daily round, thanks to a visionary dramaturgy, based on the longing for a higher reality.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

In twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, the literary apocalyptic--identifiable by its homology with the major elements of the biblical Apocalypse--undergoes progressively complex transmutations. While in the early Yeats the apocalyptic is evocative of earnest Romantic moods, in his later work it is complicated by irony, yoked to the cycles of Yeatsean history, and counteracted by exaggerated postures of defiance. In Eliot, a reductive juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the contemporary foreshortens the traditional paradigms to a diminutive modern-day scale. In Lowell, the apocalyptic is manifested variously as a bitter inversion of American Puritan eschatology, the telescoping of the personal and the cosmic, and a catastrophe in slow-motion. The climactic point of distortion, however, is reached in Ginsberg's poetry in which apocalyptic horrors form a bizarre combination with humour and bathos. While their treatment of the eschatological is widely divergent, an element common to all four poets is their ambivalence towards the paradigms of an apocalyptic new world.

Chapter One will outline the way I will be using the constructs of "national" and "personal" identity, and will then move on to provide a brief contextual setting for the creation and importance of certain literary conventions of Irish topography and character, in particular by examining the cultural nationalism in Yeats's poems. In doing so, I will outline the metaphor of evolution which is crucial in this dissertation, and will examine some of the ethical implications of employing this metaphor. Chapter Two will examine the 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, outline McCourt's employment of various stock Irish tropes, and show how this leads to a conflation of "personal" and "national" identity, to the detriment of the memoir. Chapter Three will turn to critique Are You Somebody?, the memoir by Nuala O'Faolain which was also published in 1996. I will argue that, in contrast to Angela 's Ashes, Are You Somebody? offers a constructive fusion of both kinds of identity national and personal. In Chapter Four, I will compare and contrast key issues in the texts, in relation to their both being memoirs of (Irish) national significance, published at the same time in a changing Ireland, and I will conclude by arguing that the process of invention which is necessary for the writing of a memoir is equally necessary for the creation of a national identity. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

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This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.