<p>The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. <i>cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh</i>, ‘letters were dispatched’)<i> </i>and the passive progressive (e.g. <i>bhí m’athair á leigheas acu</i>, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed.</p><p>The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. </p><p>The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive.</p><p>The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.</p>

The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the autonomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th-century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concerning the use of these two constructions is also surveyed. The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and – in the passive progressive only – overt agents. The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considerably more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality. The autonomous occurs about equally often in main and subclauses, while the passive progressive is used primarily in subclauses, mainly non-finite ones. This difference is connected to the finding that 24% of the clauses containing the autonomous denote events as part of a sequentially ordered chain of events, compared to 4% of those containing the passive progressive. The most salient dialectal variation concerns the frequency of the passive progressive: 73% of the instances of the passive progressive in the database occur in the Munster texts, compared to 22% in Connacht 5% in Ulster. The autonomous, in contrast, is fairly evenly distributed across the dialects.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX213068.

This study explores two ancient approaches to spirituality, together with the cultural contexts in which they developed. Spirituality is a popular concept today among people of widely differing religious traditions, and among those who espouse no religious tradition. Spirituality defines the way in which people relate to what concerns them ultimately, and ways in which this concern is manifested in their daily lives. This popular interest has resulted in the rise of spirituality as an academic discipline. An in-depth study of Celtic and African Spirituality is presented in this study. Celtic Spirituality dates from the fifth century CE onwards, whereas African Spirituality predates written history. Few examples of African Spirituality are recorded in writing before the twentieth century, although some have existed for centuries in oral form. Many Celtic poems, and other examples of traditional oral literature were collected and recorded in writing by medieval monks, and thus preserved for later generations in writing. Both Celtic and African Spiritualities have a healthy, integrated approach to the material world and to the spiritual world. They acknowledge a constant interaction between the two realms, and do not dismiss or devalue either the physical or the spiritual. Art and oral literature also play an important role in enabling communication and expression of ideas. Power and powerlessness emerges as a dominant theme in African thought and spirituality, especially where African peoples perceive themselves to be powerless politically or economically. Areas of relevance of Celtic and African Spiritualities to the life of the church today are identified and discussed, such as ecological spirituality; oral and symbolic communication; the role of women in church and society; and the theme of power. These are areas from which the world-wide church has much to learn from both Celtic and African Spiritualities. The findings of this study are then discussed in terms of their relevance and helpfulness to church and society. Insights from Celtic and African spiritualities should be used in the future to deepen devotional life of individual Christians and of congregations, and ideas such as ecological responsibility and recognition of the value and gifts of women should permeate the teaching and practice of the church in the future. / Religious Studies and Arabic Studies / D. Th.(Religious Studies & Arabic Studies)

For the last 200 years, 6 wagons of the same Celtic inspired wagon type have been found in Denmark: two in a bog, two in a grave each, and two in a house each. This wagon type is called the Dejbjerg wagons, named after the two most known wagons in the category; the ones found in the bog called Præstegårdmose in Dejbjerg, Denmark. The purpose of the essay is to study the Dejbjerg wagons and their relation to the four-wheeled wagons of the Celtic Europe, the contacts between Denmark and Central Europe, and examine what the purpose, or rather the use, of the wagons’ deposition was – if they even had any. To be able to do this, action-based ritual theory – a theory popularised by Catherine Bell – has been used. The essay is concluded in that the way the wagons have been deposited must have meant something for the prehistoric Danish people, and the motifs and ornaments seen on the Danish wagons have a clear Celtic influence, which leads to the conclusion that the prehistoric Danish people must have had contacts in one way or another with the Celts.

Depuis les débuts de W. B. Yeats en tant que dramaturge dans les années 1890, le personnage de théâtre irlandais semble pris dans une tempête de mémoire, chavirant entre deux écueils également mortifères, l’impossibilité d’oublier (hypermnésie) et celle de se souvenir (amnésie). Cette crise de la mémoire et par conséquent de l’identité entraîne une prolifération de troubles mentaux chez les personnages et une utilisation métaphorique croissante et peut-être inconsciente de la maladie mentale par les dramaturges comme théâtralisation des bouleversements de la société contemporaine. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) et J. M. Synge (1871-1909) font de la mémoire dysfonctionnelle non seulement l’un des thèmes centraux de leur œuvre théâtrale, mais plus encore la matière même de leur écriture, alors que la mémoire désacralisée et déstabilisée est réécrite, remodelée par une prolifération de récits mensongers et contradictoires (paramnésie). Ce travail veut alors définir le rapport entre mémoire, maladie mentale et Modernisme sur une période relativement longue (1892-1939) afin d’observer l’évolution des modes d’inscription de la mémoire à l’intérieur du texte en se centrant sur les trois troubles de la mémoire identifiés à l’époque et à la lumière desquels seront étudiées successivement les pièces. Il s’agit de faire un aller-retour entre la perception intuitive de la mémoire par la littérature et les théories psychiatriques contemporaines, l’hypothèse centrale étant que le texte théâtral intègre certaines notions cliniques dans l’étude de la mémoire, ce qui permettrait de voir dans cette relation entre texte médical et texte théâtral l’un des éléments d’un (pré-)Modernisme irlandais. / Ever since Yeats started writing plays in the 1890s, the Irish character seems to be struggling between two opposite pitfalls of memory: on the one hand an impossibility for him to forget, and the other hand an impossibility to retain memories. This memory crisis, which entails an identity crisis, leads to an increasing staging of mental disorders by the playwrights to represent, perhaps involuntarily, a destabilised contemporary society. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and J. M. Synge (1871-1909) use mental disorder not only as a theme, but also as a literary ploy as memories in their plays are relived and reconstructed in misleading and contradictory tales. This work focuses on the relationship between memory, mental disorder and Modernism in a long period (1892-1939) in order to underline the evolutions of the representation of dysfunctional memory in the texts. It successively examines the plays in the light of the three major memory disorders identified by psychiatrists at the time: amnesia, hypermnesia and paramnesia. This work relies on a parallel reading of the intuitive perception of memory by literature and the contemporary psychiatric theories, the underlying hypothesis being that some clinical notions of memory dysfunctions have been integrated to the theatrical corpus, which could be a feature of an Irish (early) Modernism.

This thesis examines the ways in which the Celtic aesthetic emerges in case studies of four writers from the last century: Brian O'Nolan (under the pseudonyms Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen), David Jones, George Mackay Brown, and John McGahern. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay, and poetry, but privileges prose and fiction. This study undertakes a formal analysis of these texts using a conceptual, thematic, and critically biographical approach. The archival methodology informing such an approach brings new scholarship into focus that either aligns these authors for the first time or reevaluates their relationships. O'Nolan, Jones, Brown, and McGahern are united here because they put forward their own theories of the Celtic aesthetic and modernized these differing representational strategies when they applied them in their fictional practices. My analysis of each writer begins with a definition of the "Celtic Aesthetic" then draws out how the Celtic is represented in his literary work, showing what we gain from reading the work within a modernist Celtic aesthetic. O'Nolan proposes a Celtic realism within a modernist understanding of the unity between form and content. He writes within a collaborative framework, retrieving modes of thought and literary effects from medieval Irish sources and scholarly texts. He and his peers were concerned with making an Irish-Celtic contribution to modern literature. David Jones develops a visual aesthetic in an Anglo-Welsh context, arguing that the Celtic enhances the potential for metamorphosis through a combination of contraries. Jones establishes a connection between the First World War and ancient Welsh tradition to symbolically pattern the experience of fighting in the trenches. George Mackay Brown shares this idea about Celtic metamorphosis and war. He claims the Celtic is a decorative aesthetic, one that is bound up with Roman Catholic theology and his understanding of Eucharistic anamnesis. Writing almost exclusively about the Orkney islands, Brown portrays the Celtic as an aspect of the Orkney's archipelagic modernism, informed by his own Scottish Gaelic linguistic heritage but also connected by sea to Wales and Ireland. John McGahern implies his theory about Celtic style in his discussions of Gaelic linguistic inheritance and the effect this produces on his English writing. McGahern also shares Brown's mysticism and O'Nolan's practice of depicting eternity in the West of Ireland. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor strain in modernist literature animate this set of literary works? Second, how do those characteristics inform our understanding of what the term "Celtic" means in a twentieth-century context and for contemporary readers? And third, what does this contribute to the current field of modernist studies? The Celtic for these writers is transnational, hybrid, decorative, and the means through which their questions about violence and despoliation could find expression in twentieth-century literature.

Term i ddisgrifio'r ffenomen o gyfuno dwy iaith mewn un datganiad yw 'cyfnewid cod'. Mae defnyddio geiriau ac ymadroddion Saesneg yn nodwedd gyffredin o Gymraeg llafar, anffurfiol nifer o siaradwyr. Nid yw'r ffenomen hon yn unigryw i'r Gymraeg; yn rhyngwladol, ceir cymdeithasau sy'n defnyddio cyfnewid cod, gan gynnwys Canada ffrancoffon. Yn ogystal â bod yn nodwedd o iaith lafar, mae'n nodwedd hefyd mewn rhai testunau llenyddol. Bwriad y traethawd hwn yw astudio rhai o'r testunau hyn, gan archwilio patrymau o gyfnewid cod a'u cymharu â damcaniaethau ysgolheigion eraill. Datblygwyd methodoleg wreiddiol i ddadansoddi'r testunau'n ieithyddol gan dynnu ar fethodoleg ysgolheigion megis Callahan (2004) a Montes-Alcalá (2013b; 2015). Yn ogystal â thrafodaeth ieithyddol, dadansoddir y testunau yng ngoleuni damcaniaethau ôl-drefedigaethedd ac ôl-foderniaeth, gan bontio maes ieithyddiaeth a theori lenyddol er mwyn archwilio pa fath o destunau sy'n defnyddio cyfnewid cod ac i ba bwrpas. Rhennir y traethawd yn bedair prif adran. Mae'r bennod gyntaf yn cynnig arolwg o'r maes ac yn trafod gwaith ysgolheigion sy'n astudio cyfnewid cod, yn ogystal â darparu cyd-destun hanesyddol a chymdeithasol ar gyfer Cymru a Chanada. Mae'r ail bennod yn trafod methodoleg yr ymchwil presennol, yn arbennig y fethodoleg a ddefnyddir i ddadansoddi'r testunau. Yna, symudir i drafod canlyniadau'r gwaith codio (penodau 3-8), cyn trafod y corpws yn ei gyfanrwydd (pennod 9). Yn y bennod olaf, ehangir y drafodaeth gan ddadansoddi'r testunau fel llenyddiaeth yn hytrach na'u trin fel corpws ieithyddol. Bwriad y traethawd hwn yw deall elfennau o Gymru a Chanada'n well - eu hieithoedd, eu llenyddiaeth a'u cymdeithasau - drwy drafod y defnydd o gyfnewid cod mewn sampl o'u llenyddiaeth greadigol. Defnyddir methodoleg wreiddiol, sy'n defnyddio elfennau rhyngddisgyblaethol blaengar, gan gyfrannu at faes cyfnewid cod llenyddol a datblygu ar y modelau sy'n bodoli eisoes. Gobeithir y bydd yr astudiaeth yn cyfrannu at y drafodaeth ryngwladol wrth gymharu cyfnewid cod mewn llenyddiaeth o ddwy gymdeithas a chanddynt ieithoedd lleiafrifol.

This thesis reaffirms the Celtic influence on Beowulf. The first chapter reevaluates past attempts to demonstrate a Celtic connection with particular emphasis on the work of Martin Puhvel and R. Mark Scowcroft. The second chapter compares Grendel’s Mother to the Lady of the Lake, from the Prose Lancelot, using the Celtic water hag motif. The third chapter analyzes how Grendel exemplifies the Celtic motifs of the violent child and the wild man by comparing him with Cu Chulainn, from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Lancelot, from the Prose Lancelot, and the Celtic wild man tales surrounding Suibhne, Myrddin, and Lailoken. The final chapter uses Michael D. C. Drout’s Lexomic analysis and a network analysis by Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna to problematize the assumed unity of the text. Therefore, this thesis provides both narrative and textual evidence to validate the Celtic influence on Beowulf.

The first decades following a country’s conversion to Christianity are sometimes marked by experimentation with native expressions of piety. Out of the multicultural environment of early Christian Northumbria such experiments created an insular Germanic version of sanctity. In the mid-seventh century, Oswiu of Northumbria (642-670), the younger brother and successor to King Oswald, constructed an elaborate narrative of God’s plan for England (without consent or guidance from the Roman Church). His narrative would weave his family into the sacred fabric of his nascent, Christian kingdom. Through skillful manipulation of oral tradition, material culture and sacri loci he crafted a unique interpretation of his brother’s death, an interpretation that Bede later canonizes in his Ecclesiastical History. King Oswiu, developed a novel form of the sacred by fusing certain established topoi of Christian sanctity with cultural elements from the Germans, Irish, Britons and Picts. Oswiu created the first Germanic holy warrior. Oswald with his dual nature as martyred warrior-king and humble saint represented a uniquely hybrid model of Germanic Christian sanctity as an imitatio for his people. It is this same cultural and intellectual environment, that gave birth to the Anglo-Saxon poetic masterpiece, The Dream of the Rood, which I suggest was written during the reign of King Aldfrith (685-705). Whereas Oswiu wished to consolidate political power through aligning his family with the newly introduced religion, the poet of the Dream of the Rood focused on exploring a related issue, the dual nature of Christ. The poem draws inspiration from the same font of political, cultural, and spiritual ideas that Oswiu used when he created his martyr-king. The inversions of traditional roles — Christ as warrior in The Dream of the Rood and warrior-king Oswald as martyr and humble servant of God — represent an outgrowth of the spiritual milieu that existed in seventh century Northumbria. The Dream of the Rood and the narrative of St. Oswald’s martyrdom reflect not merely Germanic ideals but a unique worldview stemming from the cultural and ethnic diversity of Northumbria. Both also reflect a desire by the Northumbrians to include themselves in the narrative of the Christian faith.