Place is not simply the physical reality of the topographical and human geographical features located at a particular position in space. It is also the experience of the associations, images, and memories incorporated in the landscape, with a large input from the observer. Our personal and cultural histories are important in this experience of place, which is therefore both subjective and intersubjective. The sense of place in literature is often particularly expressive of this power of association and imagery — perhaps, because of its concentrated form, especially in poetry. Literature, however, in choosing its imagery, is not only reflective of the historical, cultural and personal associations of place, but is also creative in shaping these associations of place. Literature, because it is selective and imaginative, has the power to alter our experience of place. Many of the works of the Irish literary revival possess an unusually strong sense of place — it was a literary movement which sought to emphasise Ireland and Irish themes. The selectivity and imagination of the writers, particularly because of the romantic and mythological heritages stressed in the revival, resulted in a representation of the Irish landscape -- indeed a vision of Ireland -- which is rich in symbol, association, and image. This Ireland of the imagination was also attractive and powerful enough to become part of Irish nationalist ideology. A romantic vision of the Irish landscape and its people developed by W.B. Yeats, A.E., J.M. Synge and others became part of the nationalism of militant revolutionaries such as Patrick Pearse, leader of the Irish insurrection of Easter 1916 — important in Irish history because it shifted the dominant expression of nationalism from constitutionalism to militancy. It was through the use of force rather than through constitutional methods that a separate Irish nation was established in 1922. This thesis, therefore, has three main themes. Firstly, place is an experience of the imagination -- of association, of memory, and of image. Secondly, literature is important in shaping that imagination because of its symbolism and its power in creating imagery. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the ideas of a movement of the imagination such as the Irish literary revival can have a large effect on the ideas, and therefore the ultimate actions, of a movement of action such as, that of the Irish militant nationalists. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this creative project was to advance scholarship in areas suffering a lack of attention by Ball State University. Exploring a broader scope of Irish writing than most theses would cover, this project could easily be incorporated by other universities which share Ball State's departmental impotence with regard to Irish literary studies. I chose a time frame of two-hundred years to focus attention for this course.My directed readings from my project chairperson and my research at the Dublin Writers Museum led me to the design of this hypothetical course in contemporary Irish Literary Studies. I chose texts from 1801-Present which examine the varied cultural assumptions that various sects of the Irish citizenry hold, as depicted in their literature. What I found is that as time progresses, the emphasis toward violent preservation of cultural identity increases literally. This portfolio maps out those assumptions via Irish literature. / Department of English

x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation examines transatlantic, and especially American, literary responses to urban and industrial change from the 1840s through the 1930s. It combines cultural materialist theory with environmental history in order to investigate the interrelationship of literature, economy, and biophysical systems. In lieu of a traditional ecocritical focus on wilderness preservation and the accompanying literary mode of nature writing, I bring attention to reforms of the "built environment" and to the related category of social problem fiction, including narratives of documentary realism, urban naturalism, and politically-oriented utopianism. The novels and short stories of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and Mike Gold offer an alternative history of environmental writing, one that foregrounds the interaction between nature and labor. Through a strategy of "literal reading" I connect the representation of particular environments in the work of these authors to the historical situation of actual spaces, including the western Massachusetts forest of Melville's "Tartarus of Maids," the Virginia factory town of Davis's Iron Mills, the Midwestern hinterland of Sinclair's The Jungle, and the New York City ghetto of Gold's Jews without Money. Even as these texts foreground the class basis of environmental hazard, they simultaneously display an ambivalence toward the physical world, wavering between pastoral celebrations and gothic vilifications of nature, and condemning ecological destruction even as they naturalize the very socio-economic forces responsible for such calamity. Following Raymond Williams, I argue that these contradictory treatments of nature have a basis in the historical relationship between capitalist society and the material world. Fiction struggles to contain or resolve its implication in the very culture that destroys the land base it celebrates. Thus, the formal fissures and the anxious eruptions of nature in fiction relate dialectically to the contradictory position of the ecosystem itself within the regime of industrial capital. However, for all of this ambivalence, transatlantic social reform fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century provides a model for an environmentally-oriented critical realist aesthetic, an aesthetic that retains suspicion toward representational transparency, and yet simultaneously asserts the didactic, ethical, and political functions of literature. / Committee in charge: William Rossi, Chairperson, English; Henry Wonham, Member, English; Enrique Lima, Member, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; John Foster, Outside Member, Sociology

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.

x, 208 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / The scattered instances depicting material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry should be regarded as a group. This phenomenon occurs in Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband's Message. Comparative examples of material literature can be found on the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket. This study examines material literature in these three poems, comparing their depictions of material literature to actual examples. Poems depicting material literature bring the relationship between man and object into dramatic play, using the object's point of view to bear witness to the truth of distant or intensely personal events. Material literature is depicted in a love poem, The Husband's Message, when a prosopopoeic runestick vouches for the sincerity of its master, in the heroic epic Beowulf when an ancient, inscribed sword is the impetus to give an account of the biblical flood, and is also implied in the devotional poem The Dream of the Rood, as two crosses both pre-and-post dating the poem bear texts similar to portions of the poem. The study concludes by examining the relationship between material anxiety and the character of Weland in Beowulf, Deor, Alfred's Consolation of Philosophy, and Waldere A & B. Concern with materiality in Anglo-Saxon poetry manifests in myriad ways: prosopopoeic riddles, both heroic and devotional passages directly assailing the value of the material, personification of objects, and in depictions of material literature. This concern manifests as a material anxiety. Weland tames the material and twists and shapes it, re-affirming the supremacy of mankind in a material world. / Committee in charge: Martha Bayless, Chairperson, English; James Earl, Member, English; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology