Molly Keane's other Ireland.
Item
-
Title
-
Molly Keane's other Ireland.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9521254
-
identifier
-
9521254
-
Creator
-
Capone, Gerry Joe.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Jane Marcus
-
Date
-
1995
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Modern | Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
Molly Keane's novels at first appear to depict Big House Anglo-Ireland in its golden twilight, with its handsome family mansions, dashing riders, and panoramic hunts. Her hospitable Edwardian households seem well-behaved, as attached to their properties and portraits, to their routines and regulations, and to their sporting and soldiering, as they are to their English traditions. But Keane's self-generated world contains undercurrents which can be as critical as they are dark. An odd, seemingly senseless, modernist style ruffles the surfaces of this traditional realist writer, expressing a counter content and meaning to the "country" which shapes, situates, and colors her work.;This dissertation's focus is upon Keane's Irish answer to modes of control exercised by the Anglo-Irish Big House. How do her characters' interpersonal relationships with each other, their terrain and its culture oppose the imperial frame of dominance and submission which governs them? How does Irishness reveal and measure Anglo-Ireland, its Pale, its hierarchical patterns? And how does it observe the intersection between oppression and solidarity? My goals in writing from this perspective is to, first, discover the presence, subjectivity, and agency of Irish identity in Keane's novels, second, to encourage discussion of, and recuperate the reputation of, Keane's work, and third, to join in that growing community of feminist cultural critics who, in regard to Ireland, have begun to map out the clear distinctions between Irish reality and Anglo-Irish hegemony, both historical and literary.;This work has two parts: the first three chapters examine the Big House as a psychic and social prison; the five remaining chapters observe the Irish-inspired attempts to dispel its shadows and break out of its set atmosphere. The maze of section one represents the power of an unbroken English Ascendancy, single, alone, and separate from the reality it dominates, its male architecture of mind and building overshadowing its inmates, discouraging simple human contact and, in general, enclosing life. Part two's five chapters present the many-sided material response, from roguery to Republicanism, from Gaelic identification to prisoner wisdom, and from stumbling rebellion to mutuality which constitute Keane's slightly subversive intent vis-a-vis the external standards of an intransigent institution.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
