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This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism.

Thirteenth-century France saw the construction of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns and other Relics of the Passion which had been purchased by King Louis IX. As a result, a fictitious history that explained how Charlemagne had rescued these Relics from the Saracens and brought them to Paris gained widespread popularity in later medieval France. This history was in the form of an epic poem entitled the Chanson de Fierabras, of which English translations were also made. The history was, in addition, taken to Ireland, where the Irish translation, Sdair Fortibrais developed a wide circulation. However, the Irish text had as its source a Latin translation of the French epic poem. This Latin text is preserved only partially in a unique Irish manuscript of the fifteenth century. It is assumed to be the work of an Irish cleric due to the non-appearance of this version of the story outside Ireland. Hitherto unedited, the principal aim of this project is to provide an edition of the Latin text that lies between the French epic and the Irish text, and then to discuss the position of the story in the Irish literary tradition. The first part of this thesis is entitled 'The Irish Fierabras- the Historical and Literary Framework', divided into five chapters. The first chapter asks why a certain selection of literary texts were translated into Irish during the later Middle Ages, and how they were representing the literary tastes of contemporary France. A comparison is then made with the translation literature of English, Welsh and Old Norse, leading to the conclusion that the history of the Relics of the Passion was the major reason for the interest in the Fierabras story in Ireland as in England. The second chapter outlines the spread of the Fierabras story in France, England and Ireland from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, noting any political reasons as to why the story may have been popular at any one time. The third chapter considers how the subjects of the Fierabras story were used elsewhere in the Irish tradition in order to see if any political interpretations may be applied. The results are inconclusive. The fourth chapter demonstrates that the Irish text is a close translation of the Latin, which is itself an economical translation of the French poem. The final chapter notes how the Latin text can be considered a scholastic text of the early fourteenth century, and asks if it was the work of one particular author, by comparison with another datable text. The second part, 'Manuscript, Text and Translation', is centred upon the edition of the Latin text. The edition presents the text as it is written in the manuscript, with appropriate emendations - an 'editio princeps'. The title of the text in the manuscript, Gesta Karoli Magni, is preserved. The edition is prefaced by a description of the manuscript, along with the editorial principles. It is noted how the text is preserved on one quire that would probably have been followed by a similar quire, now lost. The edition is followed by a textual apparatus, in which the editorial corrections are explained, and some further notes. A reasonably literal translation lies at the end, in which the difficulties in the Latin text are clarified as far as possible.

This study was undertaken in part as a response to proposed changes in the curriculum and teaching of Physical Education in Irish post-primary schools. I have been involved in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) for almost thirty years, almost entirely in Ireland, and I have a strong commitment to the promotion of child-centred Physical Education which I believe may be threatened by the proposed changes. My concerns are evident within this study which focuses on three Physical Education teachers in contemporary Ireland over a period of approximately three years during which three Draft New Syllabuses for Physical Education were written by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. These teachers share concerns and values regarding the teaching of Physical Education which broadly concur with my espoused ideology. Each is aware of their preferred pedagogical practices and is articulate in their defence of them. Within this study, the professional practices of these teachers are examined in the context of societal changes and the proposed curriculum changes in Physical Education evidenced in the new syllabuses. Inspiration is drawn from Basil Bernstein's work which Sadovnik (1995, p. 7) claims 'promised to connect the societal, institutional, interactional and intrapsychic levels of sociological analysis'. This study accepts Bernstein's analysis which provides a systematic structural theory allowing micro and macro aspects of the education system to be inter-related.

Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James's "center of consciousness," to E. M. Forster's theory of "round" and "flat," to Deidre Lynch's "pragmatics of character," to Alex Woloch's influential "one versus many," scaled distinctions between "major" and "minor" characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet such classifications don't capture the ways characters claim amounts of interest and consequence that are disproportionate to their textual presence. My book counters these approaches to character by calling attention to how novels concisely render the rich interior fullness of even very minor figures. While literary critics associate representations of consciousness with major characters, I demonstrate that, through the application of narrative techniques such as first-person narration and focalization, the limited amounts of text allotted to minor characters can yield brief flashes of depth. These depictions of consciousness may lack the "exhaustive presentation" that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but they are nonetheless brimming with the personality and specificity critics typically associate with central characters. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism's highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Wilkie Collins's "experiment" with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which the centrality of a major character is disrupted or challenged. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), where the title character's initial prominence is undermined by his creature's arresting autobiography, to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator's attempt to relate "everything" to "everything else," novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. By recuperating the significance of representations of minor characters' consciousnesses, I argue that such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, threatening, or even inhuman. My rethinking of minor characters' interior fullness allows me to reframe our understanding of the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in "The Natural History of German Life" (1856), literature should "amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot," resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a form of social sympathy that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel's morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who claims that readers' involvement with the novel's prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet both Eliot and latter-day critics suspect that the readerly experience of identifying with characters impedes the novel's social utility: the narrator in Middlemarch (1871-2) must ask "But why always Dorothea" of its likeable heroine, while Wayne Booth describes identification as an "immature" approach to literature that occludes "aesthetic experience." Character, however, is not always so all-consuming. I argue that both the brevity and the sheer numerousness of depictions of minor characters' consciousness make them the locus of novels' engagement with socially-oriented sympathy. By countering a protagonist's too-engrossing psychology with many full conscious centers, minor characters both mark and extend beyond novels' textual limits. In their ability to encompass and briefly reorient themselves around these many rich individual points, nineteenth-century novels themselves come to embody an ideally sympathetic perspective: capacious, inclusive, and free of excessive partiality.

Aleksandra Hajduczek

This thesis argues that prominent in the purposes of the dramaturgy of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey was the promotion of his political causes - most notably socialism. In his avidity for the cause of establishing a workers' paradise, following the Soviet model, in Ireland, his ire was drawn to the movements and institutions he perceived as distracting the masses from pursuit of this ideal: republicanism and the Church. These political ideals are prominent themes in his collected works - both fiction and non-fiction. The work is essentially divided into two sections. The first examines the development of O'Casey's ideologies - his socialism, anti-nationalism and anti-clericalism - and the backdrop against which they developed. The purpose is to establish just how passionately O'Casey felt about these ideals and how, in his letters, histories and autobiographies, he dedicated much of his effort to promoting them. Having dedicated so much time and energy to championing socialism and attacking the Church in these texts, it is little wonder they should appear so prominently in his plays. The thesis argues that O'Casey distorted the content of his Autobiographies to reinforce his role as self appointed champion of Dublin's "bottom fifth" and his beloved working class. It contends that O'Casey embellished the suffering of his childhood and the hardship endured by his family to fortify his credentials as a "socialist hero" - to be "for them" he sought to be "of them," and to provide a model for how learning and conversion to the socialist ideal would liberate them from the economic oppression that kept them low. A number of facts, even elementary ones like the number of children in the Casey brood and particular dates and addresses where he had lived, were changed to cultivate the working class hero image, the disadvantaged boy who rose up against all that an unjust and unsympathetic world could throw at him, that he so coveted. The more abject the origins, the greater the final triumph. The thesis then looks briefly at the origins and purposes of the Abbey Theatre, and its part in the Irish Renaissance that gave O'Casey his start. It focuses particularly on the role of Yeats, and his desire to build a dramatic movement which created work free from opinion. His famous determination to "reduce the world to wallpaper" brought him into conflict with O'Casey, who saw his plays as a legitimate vehicle for the expression of his own world view. It is important, in terms of the objective of this study, to establish that O'Casey's works were deliberately constructed pieces of didacticism, to demonstrate just how inimical to the original intent of the movement his purposes were. With this in mind, it is instructive to compare him with the other great Irish dramatist of the period, John Millington Synge, whose works, with their more rustic focus, promoted the kind of impressionistic 'slice of life' theatre the Abbey founders were championing. For O'Casey, the cause was paramount. He wrote morality plays. The study examines how O'Casey's dominant ideological position evolved by examining his own changing perspective about the world around him. It shows how O'Casey began to see all struggles in terms of the economic one between classes, and how he came to be converted to the tenets of socialism. His opposition to nationalism and his anti-clericalism essentially reflected his belief that they were hostile to the interests of the workers, and therefore must be engaged. The dominant sources in this section are O'Casey's letters, his Autobiographies, and his book, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army. The second section of the thesis focuses on the first seven extant plays: The Harvest Festival, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates, and The Star Turns Red, and examines how each promotes O'Casey's causes. The purpose of the thesis is not to promote a reworking of the biographical detail of O'Casey's life, but to trace the shift in the playwright's ideology - from Protestant Orange to Republican Green and finally, and most steadfastly, Socialist Red - and examine how these beliefs found voice in the characters and construction of his earlier plays.

Michael McGlynn is predominantly known around the world for his choral music that reflects the traditional sounds of Ireland. The greater body of his compositions, however, fit into the contemporary choral genre and represent a sizable contribution to the choral music repertoire of Ireland. This essay begins with a discussion of McGlynn's life and work. Extensive interviews and rehearsal comments with the composer regarding compositional process and performance practice were conducted and are included. The musical history of Ireland and details regarding the harmonic and rhythmic language specific to the vocal music of the country are included to provide background information for the reader. Song comparisons from various sources detail the living nature of Ireland's traditional music. The Appendices contain a complete list of McGlynn's works, a discography, IPA pronunciation guides for McGlynn's Irish language compositions, reference scores for all compositions discussed, and programming details about Michael McGlynn's most frequently performed choral compositions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 489-531, v. 2). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

While women have been central symbols in the struggle for Irish independence at least since the 18th century, mainstream Irish nationalist movements have mostly dismissed the concerns of actual Irish women. With a few notable exceptions, women’s experience of the Irish War of Independence (1919) and Civil War (1922) has been likewise ignored. This paper examines the treatment of women in two contemporary films about this period: Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) and Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). To contextualize these films, I first consider three classics of Irish drama and film that use women to promote or critique nationalism: Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and Jordan’s The Crying Game. Cathleen epitomizes the symbolic value of the woman-as-nation, while Juno, a critique of this nationalist idea, relies on the spectacle of the titular matriarch’s suffering to make its political point. Despite the opposing politics of the two plays, both reduce their female characters to tropes: symbolic goddess or helpless victim. Michael Collins, I argue, departs from this tradition only by converting such tropes into Hollywood stereotypes. Jordan uses the character of Kitty Kiernan to transform Collins from a dangerous revolutionary to a pacifist hero in order to make a humanist argument for the end to nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. Although Loach’s story is similar to Jordan’s (two male leads driven apart by the Civil War), he centralizes women in a way that Jordan does not. Loach’s socialist aesthetic and broad cultural critique allow his female characters to escape victimhood (though not suffering) by pointedly developing their political agency. Loach’s film, therefore, represents a significant intervention in the literature surrounding the Irish conflict, not because it “sides” with the IRA, but because it privileges women’s lived experience. / text