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This thesis, drawing from the Gothic paradigm, attempts to complicate and supplement the revisionist reading of Patrick McCabe¡¦s The Butcher Boy (1992). The novel tells the murder story of Francie Brady, a troubled Irish boy who slaughters his Anglicized neighbor like a pig. Critics have aligned the novel with the revisionist attempt to debunk nationalist meta-narrative. They have also associated the sensational plotline and grotesque imageries in the novel with the Gothic tradition. Revisionism and Gothicism, therefore, are two established reading strategies to The Butcher Boy. Both ideas, however, are used by critics with certain unease, for both terms are under much critical debate. Moreover, in the end of the novel, McCabe astutely eschews moral judgment on Francie¡¦s horrific deed. Francie¡¦s first-person narrative also allows the reader to sympathize with the young murderer. In this regard, McCabe keeps a sympathetic undertone in the murder story, which a simplistic revisionist reading cannot fully account for. This thesis, bringing the two critical paradigms together, argues that McCabe¡¦s use of Gothicism is crucial to understanding his complicated re-visioning of Ireland in the 1960s. Through historicizing the Gothic fiction, the thesis underlines the idea of ¡§antiquarianism¡¨ to explicate the historical background of the novel¡XIreland at the turn of the 1960s when the Republic underwent a transformation of national ethos, from conservative nationalism to modernization. I contend that while the novel is critical of the waning nationalism, it is also suspicious of Ireland¡¦s relentless modernizing project. From a cultural dimension of the Gothic, the thesis foregrounds the relation between Gothic imagination and racial discourse. In this light, I intend to demonstrate that the recurrent image of ¡§pig¡¨ in the novel is a Gothicized racial stereotype of the Irish people. Through Francie¡¦s struggle with the pig image, the thesis examines Irish people¡¦s negotiation with their often derogatory racial stereotype. Finally, resorting to the Gothic device of ¡§double bind,¡¨ I attempt to expound McCabe¡¦s underlying sympathy for the homicidal and suicidal boy, who is depicted as both victim and murderer, both pig and butcher.

This dissertation discusses contemporary U.S. women’s literature in the context of women’s struggles with nation and nationalism, examining how Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Naylor, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Nora Okja Keller contest articulations of gender, ethnicity, and cultural affiliations in terms of the dynamics of national inclusion and exclusion. Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985), Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) were written at the crossroads between contemporary feminisms and nationalisms and reveal women’s centrality to national projects. Approaching these four literary texts not only as cultural narrations of nation but also as critical engagements between feminism and nationalism, this dissertation argues that postnational and/or transnational politics are manifest in these women writers’ articulation of women’s liminality between their cultural nations and the U.S. The chapters that follow analyze how women writers narrate the nation in various contexts while reinscribing women as subjects of national agency and the U.S. as a transnational and postnational site of contending memories and national narratives. Chapter II examines a possible women’s nationalist attempt to de-essentialize the nation by reading Silko’s Ceremony. Silko provides a hybrid narration of the nation that challenges the full blood subjects’ hegemonic model of Native American cultural nationalism. Silko, however, uses the gendered rhetoric of nation-as-women and denies women as national subject. Chapter III moves to a critical standpoint on cultural nationalism through reading Naylor’s Linden Hills. Tackling the unmarked status of masculinity in Silko’s project, chapter III examines how Naylor problematizes the gendered foundations of the African American cultural nation and deconstruct her contemporary African American cultural nationalism. Chapter IV discusses Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as a literary supplement to hegemonic history of the U.S. and Asian America and as a feminist corrective to masculinist narrations of the nation. The last chapter discusses the possibilities of transnational feminist coalitions through reading Keller’s Comfort Woman. In their feminist, transnational, or postnational critiques of nationalisms, women writers demonstrate that it is not possible to reimagin the nation without feminism and textually embody the significant contributions of feminism to contemporary liberatory movements.

This dissertation explores conceptions of nationalism in early modern English literature and culture. Specifically, it examines multiple definitions of nation in dramatic works by William Shakespeare (Cymbeline), John Fletcher (Bonduca), Thomas Dekker (The Shoemaker's Holiday), and Robert Daborne (A Christian Turned Turk) as well as in antiquarian studies of England by William Camden (Britannia and Remains Concerning Britain) and Richard Verstegan (Restitution of Decayed Intelligence). This dissertation argues that early modern English nationalism is a dynamic phenomenon that extends beyond literary and historical genres typically associated with questions of national identity, such as history plays, legal tracts, and chronicle histories. Nationalism, this dissertation demonstrates, appears in Roman-Britain romances and tragedies, city comedies, and both dramatic and prose accounts of piracy. Nation appears in myriad voices - from ancient British queens to shoemakers and pirates. And the nationalisms they articulate are as varied as the genres in which they appear as nation is negotiated both across and within these works. Furthermore, this dissertation illustrates that not only are concepts of nation and national identity being explored, the very terms on which to construct nation are being defined and re-defined. Nation is variously filtered through a myriad of issues including the influence of the monarch (particularly James I), origin, language, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and national rivals. This dissertation also discusses works which move us beyond our pre-conceived notions about nation by advocating more corporate cosmopolitan models. The models are based on such qualities as membership, occupation, productivity and the pursuit of wealth rather than birth order or location. These corporate and piratical nationalisms extend beyond the confining geopolitical borders of most concepts of nation. Early modern English nationalism is not singularly defined by the monarch, the church, the legal system, or even antiquarian studies of Britain and England. It is not singularly defined by any one voice or text.

The Artical is about gender issue of nationalism.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 8, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-368).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.

Thesis--Auburn University, 2008. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.112-128).

Originally presented as the author's Habilitationsschrift, Giessen, 1933/34. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-119).