My research is, as far as I am aware, the first reading of Dubliners as a specific and profound engagement with the ideas of the Celtic Twilight school. The recurrence of dreamlike states, such as ghostly visions and reverie, symbolizes aspects of an urban petit-bourgeois Catholic Irishncss excluded by Revivalist propaganda. Joyce earths popular notions of spirituality so that in their dreamlike states characters arc tantalized by glimpses of an evanescent world. He shapes such experiences in relation to similar moments in Celtic Twilight writing, delineating Dubliners' states of mind as an implicit rebuke to mythic ideal and romantic versions of Irishness, and suggesting a Dublin Otherworld to rival the one popularized by Yeats, A.E., Lady Gregory and Synge. Joyce reacts, too, against George Moore's brand of faux Naturalism which claims to present the 'real' Ireland in The Untilled Field. Joyce's project involves parody of privileged Celtic Twilight genres such as the fairy story, heroic legend, and folk song. The precise reactions in Dubliners expose the distortions of the apparently authentic Celtic Revival, which, for all its patriotism, is, ironically, unlrish since it is influenced by a genteel English sensibility. Such parody is complex in terms of mood since the wit co-exists with delicate psychological investigation and exploration of Dublin tribal consciousness. Against fashionable opinion, Joyce, in Dubliners, reclaims the city of Dublin as fit territory for literature and its citizens as capable of spiritual experience, however complex and potentially compromised this spiritual state might be.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:444399 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Sutcliffe, Joseph Andrew |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5123/ |
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