THE SOVEREIGN WOMAN: HER IMAGE IN IRISH LITERATURE FROM MEDB TO ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE.
Item
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Title
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THE SOVEREIGN WOMAN: HER IMAGE IN IRISH LITERATURE FROM MEDB TO ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE.
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Identifier
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AAI8222953
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identifier
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8222953
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Creator
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KELLY, MARY PAT.
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Contributor
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Marvin Magalader
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Date
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1982
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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The Sovereign Woman: Her Image in Irish Literature from Medb to Anna Livia Plurabelle analyzes the central role the women of myth, history and fiction play in Irish literature.;The study focuses on major works from various periods including the iron age epic Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and ancillary stories from early Irish literature, the verse and hagiography that flourished in the monasteries of the Celtic Church from the early sixth century through the Viking conquests, the poetry created for the aristocrat families of the Middle Ages and Renaissance by professional poets of the Gaelic tradition and finally the works that mark the rebirth of Irish literature in modern times--particularly James Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's women characters: Gretta in "The Dead"; the girl of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Molly Bloom and Anna Livia reflect a long tradition of Irish heroines in whom independence, sensuality, generosity and, most important, sovereignty blend in a typical woman who reappears in legends and stories down through Irish literary history.;When the women characters of Ancient Irish literature first appeared again in the 20th century through the Irish literary revival authors such as Lady Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats depended mainly on German translations of the Old Irish texts which they retold in English. Now the translations direct from the Old Irish to English by writers who are poets as well as scholars such as Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Frank O'Connor, present a quite different picture of the heroines than did those of the Ascendancy whose sensibilities and cultural backgrounds colored their presentation of women in these stories. A close reading of Matthew Arnold's essay The Study of Celtic Literature reveals these attitudes.;The qualities of the ancient heroines appear again in Joyce's women. His work in turn influences the present generation of Irish writers--Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Seamus Heaney--in whose poetry and translations from the ancient literature the sovereign woman lives again.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
