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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

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This dissertation focuses on the empowerment and disempowerment of the female body during the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998). It explores the ways that visual texts – mainly film and theater – expose, explain, and challenge the denigrating perceptions of the female body that prevailed during and after the prison protests of the early 1980s for special category status. In each of my four chapters, I examine a Troubles film or drama via French Feminist Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the female body as an abject threat to patriarchy. This dissertation utilizes the theory of abjection as a way to explain the elision of the female body, manifested as the so-called “dirty” protester, the mother and wife of the hunger striker, and the transgender female, from the pages of history, but with the ultimate goal of challenging the very perception of the female body as inherently abject.

The ‘Uncreated’ Voice of a Nation: James Joyce and the Twentieth Century Irish Bildungsroman places James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in conversation with numerous later twentieth century Bildungsromane to argue that texts by Edna O’Brien, John McGahern, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe, Jamie O’Neill, Eimear McBride, Seamus Deane, and Bernard MacLaverty examine the tension between liberation and oppression, hope and despair, to explore the complexities of these tensions untapped by Joyce, paradoxically producing darker conclusions in the Free State/Republic than in the North. I suggest that the postcolonial Irish writer feels greater anxieties about allowing the form of the Bildungsroman any sense of resolution than his/her colonial, Northern Irish counterpart. If one views liberation from colonial rule as a future event, that future is “uncreated” in its brightly-colored potential. If one views liberation from colonial rule as a past event, the present is instead an examination of the failures of revolution and the lingering ghosts of colonial rule that often appear in the guise of these very revolutionary failures.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace / This dissertation explores what a new materialist line of thinking can offer the study of eighteenth-century Irish and British literature. It sees specific objects that were considered indicative of eighteenth-century Irish identity—coins, mantles, flax, and spinning wheels—as actively indexing and shaping the formal development of Irish character in fiction, from Jonathan Swift to Sydney Owenson. Through these objects, I trace and analyze the material origin stories of two eighteenth-century discursive phenomena: the developments of Irish national character and Irish literary character. First, in the wake of colonial domination, the unique features and uses of objects like coins bearing the Hibernian typeface, mantles, and flax helped formulate a new imperial definition of Irish national character as subdued, raced, and, crucially, feminine. Meanwhile, material processes such as impressing coins or spinning flax for linen shaped ways of conceiving an interiorized deep subjectivity in Irish fiction during the rise of the individual in late eighteenth-century ideology. Revising recent models of character depth and interiority that take English novel forms as their starting point (Deidre Lynch’s in particular), I show how Ireland’s particular material and colonial contexts demonstrate the need to refit the dominant, Anglocentric understanding of deep character and novel development. These four material objects structure Irish character’s gradual interiorization, but, unlike the English model, they highlight a politically resistant, inaccessible depth in Irish character that is shadowed by gendered, colonial violence. I show how, although ostensibly inert, insignificant, or domestic, these objects invoke Ireland’s violent history through their material realities—such as the way a coin was minted, when a mantle was worn, or how flax was prepared for spinning—which then impacts the very form of Irish characters in literary texts. My readings of these objects and their literary manifestations challenge the idea of the inviolable narrative and defend the aesthetics and complexity of Irish characters in the long eighteenth century. In the case of particular texts, I also consider how these objects’ agency challenges the ideology of Britain’s imperial paternalism. I suggest that feminized Irish objects can be feminist in their resistant materiality, shaping forms of Irish deep character that subvert the colonial gaze. Using Ireland as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates how theories of character and subjectivity must be grounded in specific political, material contexts while arguing that a deeper engagement with Irish materiality leads to a better understanding of Irish character’s gendering for feminist and postcolonial analysis. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The report describes the production of graphic correspondence and marketing material for DUCIS(Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies).A logotype symbol is created on the basis of an element from the Celtic art, and a graphic material thatharmonies with this ideal of style is built around the symbol. A unique visiting card, correspondence cardand letterhead is produced to strengthen the identity of DUCIS outwards.The work proceeds with an international education folder which is an important element in the marketingwork for the MA-education which starts in the autumn of 2003. Two posters, one for the opening ofDUCIS in may 2003 and one for a conference in 2004, are produced. Finally, a redesign of the book coverfor NIS, Nordic Irish Studies, is carried out.The report describes the working process consisting of meetings, practical work and other elementswithin the process. The conclusion is that the work has been quite successful and that this, to a largeextent, depended on an engaged and supporting commissioner. The commissioner also is very satisfi edwith the results.The in-depth studies of the project is about the art and design of the Celtic culture throughout history.The text gives an account for the history and expressions of Celtic art from its birth, 2800 years ago, untilits death in 13th century Ireland and Scotland. Special attention is payed to the golden age of ChristianCeltic art on the british islands, the era from which the pattern of the DUCIS logotype originates.

The Celts, as a distinct and culturally-unified people, are a social construction as much as an historical reality, endowing Celtic antiquity with a certain availability of outline, and a certain scope. When the Celtic world began to be scrutinised in the eighteenth century, its borders could, therefore, be filled with concepts drawn from other antiquities. Classical antiquity, and particularly its Greek variety, was a vital coordinate in this navigation of the past. This thesis explores the history of these Graeco-Celtic negotiations. Using Reinhart Koselleck's theory of asymmetric counterconcepts, it calculates the precise angles of the relation between Greek and Celt in antiquarianism, comparative mythology and folklore, Classics and Celtic Studies, from the early eighteenth and to the late nineteenth centuries. The thesis then puts forward one particular writer as an original and unique interpreter of the tradition of Graeco-Celtic relations, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge. Through archival research, it demonstrates quite how deeply Synge was immersed in this scholarly tradition; in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, he followed a deliberate path of reading in antiquarianism, Classics, Celtic Studies, comparative linguistics, mythology and folklore. It then argues that Synge transformed such Graeco-Celtic scholarship into a formidable authorial strategy, in his prose account of his travels on the Aran Islands and his famous, controversial plays. By identifying this strategy, it reveals how Synge's work exploits the continued presence and power of antiquity. Most studies of the reception of Greek antiquity in Irish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries assume a straightforward, inherent connection between Ireland and Greece. This thesis complicates that connection by identifying the powerful history of Graeco-Celtic relations and, particularly, its transformation at the hands of J.M. Synge. This will allow for scrutiny of what actually happens at the crux between Greece and Ireland in literary texts.

While many modernist authors exhibited eugenicist tendencies which I While many modernist authors exhibited eugenicist tendencies which I will detail in this paper, Joyce wrote, implicitly and explicitly, against it. Joyce’s anti-eugenics aesthetic, expressed almost in passing by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916), becomes entangled in questions of bodies and national identity in Ulysses. I intend to identify a series of moments in which disgust and bodily difference in Ulysses counter the eugenics trends in elitist modernism while simultaneously criticizing racism in Irish nationalism that, in some ways, drove the movement for Irish independence. It would be impossible to provide and exhaustive exploration of all the anti-eugenics imagery in Ulysses. this project attempts to differentiate Joyce more thoroughly from his contemporaries through readings of Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom. Gerty is the disabled granddaughter of a racist nationalist, and she functions as an articulation of Joyce’s search for an Ireland that rejects simplistic, narrow-minded nationalism. Molly, Ulysses’ ultimate heroine, takes ownership of her sexuality, thereby countering the eugenics project. I read both women as counter-eugenics icons who personify an anti-hegemonic ideal through their relationships with their own bodies.

Mermaids and human-seal hybrids, called selkies, are a vibrant part of Celtic folklore, including ballad and song traditions. Though some of these songs have been studied in-depth, there is a lack of research comparing them to each other or to their contemporary renditions. This research compares traditional melodies and texts of the songs “The Mermaid,” “The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry,” and “Hó i Hó i” to contemporary recordings by top female vocalists in Scottish and Irish music. The texts and melodies I have identified as “source” material are those most thoroughly examined by early ballad and folklore scholars. The source material for “The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry” is a 1938 transcription by Otto Andersson. The source of notation and text for “The Mermaid” is the ballad’s A version from the Greig-Duncan Collection. The melody of “Hó i Hó i,” collected by folklorist David Thomson and published in 1954, serves as the third source version. Modern recordings included in the study are “The Mermaid” by Kate Rusby, “The Grey Selchie” by Karan Casey with Irish-American band Solas, and “Òran an Ròin,” a variant of “Hó i Hó i,” by Julie Fowlis. This study compares the forms, melodic contours, and texts of these variants, examining ways that contemporary recordings have maintained the integrity of traditional songs and ballads from which they are derived while adapting them to draw in a contemporary audience. The thesis illustrates the continued and evolving presence of mermaids and selkies in Scottish and Irish song.