Bildungsroman is a literary genre developed from the ideas of the Enlightenment. The genre usually portrays young men coming into the society which raise the question: what literary possibilities exist for portraying young women coming into adult life? The purpose of this study is to analyze novels from two different time periods about girls growing up in an Irish environment to answer how their possibilities coming in to the society are portrayed. Questions that are being answered are: how do the novels discuss class, gender and relationships? How do the novels discuss society? The material consists of The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien (1930–) from 2020 and Normal People by Sally Rooney (1991–) from 2019. The Country Girls was first published in 1960 and both novels used in this study are translated into Swedish. The study uses class and gender theoretical frameworks. The class perspecitve is mainly inspired by the theories of Pierre Bourdieu about different forms of capital, disposition and habitus but Ulrika Holgersson’s feminist framework for analyzing class will also be incorporated. For the gender perspecitve Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman’s idea of sex, sex category and gender will be used to discuss how characters organize their behaviour according to sex category. The gender perspective is also largely influenced by Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories regarding performativity. The method for this study is a comparative analysis based on close reading. This study shows that these novels use opposites and protagonists in different ways to discuss oppression in the Irish society and propose solutions to that issue. While The Country Girls suggests that men are the main oppressor of women Normal People also portrays a patriarchal society but where capitalism too plays a destructive part. The Country Girls proposes feminist transnational alliances to overcome oppression and Normal People uses masochism as a theme to show how what hurts can be transformed into pleasure.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the influence of Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long's novel No Mean City (1935) on the representation of working-class subjectivity in modem Scottish urban fiction. The novel helped to focus literary attention on a predominantly male, working-class, urban and realistic vision of modern Scotland. McArthur and Long explore - in their representations of destructive slum-dwelling characters - the damaging effects of class and gender on working-class identity. The controversy surrounding the book has always been intense, and most critics either deplore or downplay the full significance of No Mean City's literary impact. My dissertation re-examines one of the most disliked and misrepresented working-class novels in modern Scottish literary history. McArthur and Long's literary legacy, notwithstanding its many detractors, has become something to write against. Through examination of works by James Barke, John McNeillie, Edward Gaitens, Robin Jenkins, Bill McGhee, George Friel, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, Meg Henderson and A.L. Kennedy, the thesis outlines how the challenge represented by No Mean City has survived the decades following its publication. It argues that contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the novel's influence has been instrumental, not detrimental, to the evolution of modern Scottish literature. Ultimately I hope to pave the way toward a fuller, more nuanced understanding of No Mean City's remarkable impact, and to demonstrate how pervasive its legacy has been to Scottish writers from the 1930s to the 1990s.

This project investigates the social role of gentleman in Victorian England as defined in two Victorian novels, Dinah Maria Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Mulock and Dickens promote the middle-class gentleman as a role that prioritizes the fulfillment of duty. Mulock's protagonist, John Halifax, displays this gentlemanliness throughout his social and economic rise. He bridges the upper and lower classes and embodies both a model and a pathway to middleclass gentlemanliness. Dickens's protagonist, Pip, develops this middle-class gentlemanliness as he learns from his own and four other characters' experiences. Dickens separates the inward, duty-focused gentleman and the outward, appearance-focused gentleman in the four characters that influence Pip, thus emphasizing their relationship and the power of social role encoding. These two novels reveal the performances of roles as social constructions that utilize the power of group definitions and the role writers play in shaping those definitions. / Department of English