Patrick Kavanagh's position in twentieth-century Irish literature is both influential and anomalous. His rendering of rural Irish life leads some critics to emphasize his social realism, while others praise him as a lyricist in the Romantic tradition. This study suggests that Kavanagh's varied and often mixed literary strategies respond satirically to his cultural milieu throughout his career. Kavanagh reclaims the materials of Irish stereotype by placing them in dialogue and by exploiting his own reputation as an "authentic" peasant-poet. Chapter one traces the terms of his social and aesthetic critique that reaches fruition in "The Great Hunger" through the treatment of landscape, agriculture, and rural society beginning with Kavanagh's earliest poems. The use of the theater as a framing device in "The Great Hunger" evokes the stage Irishman and the drama of the Irish Literary Revival in order to redefine the rural subject against its dominant-culture representations. The second chapter examines the figure of the peasant-poet in Kavanagh's semi-autobiographical The Green Fool and in satirical verse-plays. By employing and undermining an ethnic stereotype aimed at his own personal history, Kavanagh satirizes the Irish Literary Revival, Anglo-American modernism, and de Valera's rhetoric of national purity. Kavanagh's responses to the commodification of tradition by Irish nationalism are further examined in the third chapter; his satires play upon the wake and the mummery as customary occasions for social criticism, but do not represent them as artifacts of an essential Irish culture. Chapter four links Kavanagh's critique of nationalist essentialism to modernism's ideology and style, culminating in a reading of "Lough Derg." The poem explores and rejects both social documentary and modernism's fragmentation of experience, setting the Catholic pilgrimage in the context of Irish Partition and isolation during World War II, and ultimately affirming the spiritual dimensions of human change and communication. The fifth chapter concludes that rather than surrendering earlier themes, the Canal Bank poems employ Kavanagh's familiarity with the natural world within a liminal urban setting that reflects his career-long concerns with audience, cultural commodification, and the poet's comic role.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8973 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Barnes, Rita Marlene |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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