Aleksandra Hajduczek

"May 2006." / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, Dept. of English. / "May 2006." / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 36-39)

Kate O'Brien was one of Ireland's best female writers; moreover, she was one of the first to centre on the Catholic Middle Class in her writing, as this class was long neglected. O'Brien was famous for her women-oriented books in which she portrayed the lives of women of the rising bourgeoisie of Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We can trace a certain development in O'Brien's writing, throughout her career she becomes more radical and comes to voice feminist notions about women being equal to men as well women's seeking independence from the world dominated by men. Most of her novels are family-oriented and may be called Bildungsromans as the protagonists, which apart from two books are all female, develop and grow to maturity and learn to understand the world and their place in it. As this thesis examined how the women in O'Brien's novels reflect the situation of women in her home country, it is apparent that throughout her life the writer became more radical and sceptical towards the fate of women in Ireland. Therefore, in her first written pieces she portrays women in their traditional roles as dutiful wives, daughters, or mothers. It is only in her later writing that the women manage to emancipate themselves and lead their lives independently. In O'Brien's first two...

This dissertation attempts to compare and contrast the functions of cultural memory and myth in both Heaney and Krog's work. By doing so, I look at what it means for both writers to work within a culture or tradition, and how they both mediate their religious or racial identity within a fractured and divided society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / "Mit Genehmigung ... erfolgt die Drucklegung der Dissertation in englischer Sprache. Ein Auszug der Arbeit in deutscher Sprache soll in einer anglistischen Zeitschrift zum Abdruck kommen."

This thesis, Strangers in the House, illuminates how "strangers in the house"--unconventional women, Travellers, emigrants and immigrants--have made significant contributions to the evolving traditions of Irish literature and culture. I trace the literary and creative contributions of groups that were silenced during the early twentieth-century nation-building project to review the impact of the Irish Revival, from the politics of Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera to the writings of Yeats, Gregory and Synge, on the establishment of an "authentic" Irish identity. I draw on scholarship that establishes Ireland as a postcolonial nation, suggesting that contemporary identity is closely linked to the national, religious and gender expectations reinforced during the periods of colonialism and decolonization. My scholarship considers individuals who continue to be peripheral in the "reimagining" of what it means to be Irish in a post-Celtic Tiger, E.U. Ireland.

This thesis examines the representation of Ireland in images and texts produced in Britain and France between 1839 and 1855. I argue that in this period, Ireland functioned as a crucial site for the negotiation and transformation of the relationship between the two nations. Chapter One examines a popular middle-class British publication of 1845, Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.. .and Emmett's Insurrection. Through an analysis of George Cruikshank's illustrations to this work, I explore the ways that a predominant image of the Irish was linked to British anxieties concerning a potential political alliance between the French and the Irish based on what was represented as a "natural" religio-racial connection between the two nations. Developing this transnational focus, I argue that French concern with Ireland exacerbated such constructions. Chapter Two examines liberal and leftleaning French publications that took up representations of the Irish between 1839 to 1846 in order to critique Britain's role as a modern industrial nation. In Chapter Three I analyze how "Irishness" in the French press between 1845 and 1847, and in satires by artists like Cham and Paul Gavarni, served both as a warning against French adoption of the English economic model of laissez-faire capitalism, and as a commentary on domestic working class poverty. Chapter Four explores how the Irish were taken up both visually and textually in the French press to be momentarily transformed into active agents of radical change in the year of France's revolution of 1848. My final chapter concludes with an analysis of French artist Gustave Courbet's figure of an Irishwoman as a complex marker of both pauperism and potential revolution in a contentious painting displayed strategically outside Paris' 1855 Exposition universelle. In the course of this analysis "Ireland" is shown to raise a range of issues concerning relations between France and Britain. While images of Irishness evoked the mobility and exchange that characterized an early moment of free trade, those same images could simultaneously arouse anxieties in both Britain and France around industrialization, the "advancement" of civil liberties, the growing pauperization of populations, and the threat to both nations of calls for republican reform. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This thesis will explore how writers of nineteenth-century Irish horror fiction, namely short stories and novels, used their works to express the social, cultural, and political events of the period. My thesis will employ a New Historicist approach to discuss the effects of colonialism on the writings, as well as archetypal criticism to analyse the mythic origins of the relevant metaphors. The structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov will be used to discuss the notion of the works' appeal as supernatural or possibly realistic works. The theory of Mikhail Bakhtin is used to discuss the writers' linguistic choices because such theory focuses on how language can lead to conflicts amongst social groups. The introduction is followed by Chapter One, "Ireland as England's Fantasy." This chapter discusses Ireland's literary stereotype as a fantasyland. The chapter also gives an overview of Ireland's history of occupation and then contrasts the bucolic, magical Ireland of fiction and the bleak social conditions of much of nineteenth-century Ireland. Chapter Two, "Mythic Origins", analyses the use of myth in nineteenth-century horror stories. The chapter discusses the merging of Christianity and Celtic myth; I then discuss the early Irish belief in evil spirits in myths that eventually inspired horror literature. Chapter Three, "Church versus Big House, Unionist versus Nationalist," analyses how the conflicts of Church/Irish Catholicism vs. Big House/Anglo-Irish landlordism, proBritish Unionist vs. pro-Irish Nationalist are manifested in the tales. In this chapter, I argue that many Anglo-Irish writers present stern anti-Catholic attitudes, while both Anglo-Irish and Catholic writers use the genre as political propaganda. Yet the authors tend to display Home Rule or anti-Home Rule attitudes rather than religious loyalties in their stories. The final chapter of the thesis, "A Heteroglossia of British and Irish Linguistic and Literary Forms," deals with the use of language and national literary styles in Irish literature of this period. I discuss Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and its applications to the Irish novel; such a discussion because nineteenth-century Ireland was linguistically Balkanised, with Irish Gaelic, Hibemo-English, and British English all in use. This chapter is followed by a conclusion. / English / M. Lit. et Phil. (English)

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.

To understand the complexity of life in a city one needs to consider a spectrum of experience. Belfast has a history of conflict and division, particularly in relation to the Troubles, reflected in comprehensive academic studies of how this has affected, and continues to affect, the citizens. But this is a particular mode of representation, a vision of life echoed in fictional literature. People's quotidian lives can and do transcend the grand narratives of the Troubles that have come to dominate these discourses. Anthropology has traditionally accorded less epistemological weight to fleeting and superficial encounters with strangers, but this mode of sociality is a central feature of life in the city. The modern stranger navigates these relationships with relative ease. Communicating with others through narrative – personal stories about our lives – is fundamental to what it is to be human, putting storytelling at the heart of anthropological study. Engagements with strangers may be brief encounters or build into acquaintanceship, but these superficial relationships are not trivial. How we interact with strangers – our public presentation of the self to others through the personal stories we share – can give glimpses into the private lives of individuals. Listening to stories of quotidian life in Belfast demonstrates a range of people's existential dilemmas and joys that challenges Troubled representations of life in the city. The complexity, size and anonymity of the city means the anthropologist needs different ways of reaching people; this thesis is as much about exploring certain anthropological methodologies as it is about people and a place. Through methods of walking, performance, human-animal interactions, my body as a research subject, and using fictional literature as ethnographic data, I interrogate the close relationship between method, data and analysis, and of knowledge-production and knowledge-dissemination. I present quotidian narratives of Belfast's citizens that are Not-the-Troubles.