Culligan, Niall;
(2022)
Beyond the Pale: James Joyce and rural Ireland.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Beyond the Pale.pdf - Accepted Version Download (21MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Since the Middle Ages, the Pale, an area around Dublin most subject to British influence, has been separated both politically and in the cultural imagination from the rest of Ireland. This thesis looks at the extent to which James Joyce, often considered the urban modernist par excellence, goes beyond this particular pale in his work, exploring his many literal and literary forays into rural Ireland. It is especially concerned with how Joyce reacted to the Irish Literary Revivalists’ preoccupation with rural life, developing instead his own vision of an unromanticized, modern rural Ireland. Chapter One examines Joyce’s interaction with early Revivalist debates regarding the direction the country should take: should it be rural, traditional, and nationalist, or open, European, and cosmopolitan? It argues for a more nuanced appreciation of Joyce’s cosmopolitanism, one alert to the interplay between modernity and tradition in rural Ireland. Chapter Two investigates Joyce’s depiction of the rural peasantry, a staple of Revivalist literature, examining how this portrayal is recast between the early manuscripts of Stephen Hero and the eventual A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Chapter Three returns to the city, arguing for what I term a literary rus in urbe in Dubliners and Ulysses, whereby the border between rural and urban is shown to be porous, with rural elements entering the city space, and urban characters straying into liminal zones on the city’s periphery. Chapter Four focuses on spatial and geographical representations of rural Ireland, most especially in Finnegans Wake. In particular it investigates the Four Old Men’s representation of the provinces, and Shaun’s transformation into ‘landshape’, sprawled across the centre of Ireland. In conclusion, this thesis offers a reappraisal of Joyce as a purely urban writer, arguing for the centrality of rural life within his brand of modernism.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Beyond the Pale: James Joyce and rural Ireland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149458 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
