A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses November 2015 A National Style: A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story Andrew Fox University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Fox, Andrew, "A National Style: A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 461. https://doi.org/10.7275/7393259.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/461 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A National Style: A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story A Dissertation Presented by ANDREW FOX Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2015 English © Copyright by Andrew Fox 2015 All Rights Reserved A National Style: A Critical Historiography of the Irish Short Story A Dissertation Presented By ANDREW FOX Approved as to style and content by _________________________________________________ Margaret O’Brien, Chair _________________________________________________ Asha Nadkarni, Member _________________________________________________ Michael Gorra, Member _________________________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Department Head English Department ABSTRACT A NATIONAL STYLE: A CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE IRISH SHORT STORY SEPTEMBER 2015 ANDREW FOX, B.A., UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN M.A., UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN M.Phil., TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Margaret O’Brien This dissertation examines the artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that mediates between the two. In Ireland, I argue, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up with the political narrative of the nation state’s decolonization. This process I view as symptomatic of a broader critical tendency to view Irish cultural narratives as inextricable from national ones, whereby literary interventions either are viewed as mere reflections of, or are assimilated to systems of thought preoccupied with, the national question. It is my contention that this overcoding of Irish culture by Irish politics has impoverished contemporary scholarship on the subject of the Irish short story, depriving it of an adequate appreciation of the historically longer and spatially wider cultural milieu in which Irish literary production actually proceeds. What I establish in this dissertation is an image of the Irish short story as a site uniquely sensitive to a variety of historical contingencies and intellectual preoccupations, iv of which decolonizing nationalism is but one. I demonstrate how the form came about internationally, investigate how it functions and evaluate the historical context in which it first emerged in an Ireland bent on decolonization both political and cultural. I then explore the form’s capacity to mount diverse and sometimes vexed interpretations of national culture in a range of short stories from the Irish Literary Revival and counter- revival periods, and critique the role played by adversarial political positions in those stories’ later reception. Finally, I consider the form’s growing preoccupation, alongside the rise of Irish feminist and postmodern scholarships during the latter decades of the twentieth century, with the tensions inherent between national and gender identities. In so doing, I demonstrate the ways in which the short story has been shaped in Ireland not by the unfolding of a single historical narrative but by the ruptures and disruptions of successive historical moments, and suggest how it may have helped in some small way to shape those moments themselves. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1 1.1 General Introduction..........................................................................................1 1.2 Cultural Nationalism..........................................................................................3 1.3 The Short Story and The Lonely Voice...............................................................8 1.4 Irish Studies and the Irish Short Story.............................................................13 2. ORAL NARRATIVES AND TRANSITIONAL TEXTS.............................................19 2.1 Introduction......................................................................................................19 2.2 Oral Traditions and Imagined Communities....................................................19 2.3 Archipelagic Identities.....................................................................................27 2.4 “What is a short story?”...................................................................................38 2.5 Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.........................................................43 3. THE MODERN IRISH SHORT STORY......................................................................54 3.1 Introduction......................................................................................................54 3.2 “Spiritual Nationalism” and “Protestant Magic”.............................................54 3.3 In a Glass Darkly.............................................................................................61 3.4 The Theatre and the Mob.................................................................................67 3.5 Joyce’s Influences............................................................................................71 3.6 Dubliners..........................................................................................................77 4. COUNTER-REVIVALS................................................................................................87 vi 4.1 Introduction......................................................................................................87 4.2 From Free State to Republic: 1923-1949.........................................................88 4.3 A School of Satirists: Flann O’Brien and Liam O’Flaherty............................93 4.4 Lines of Communication: Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor..................106 4.5 Naturalism and Lyricism................................................................................124 4.6 Samuel Beckett: The Last Naturalist.............................................................129 5. FEMINISMS AND POSTMODERNISMS.................................................................139 5.1 Introduction....................................................................................................139 5.2 “The Inscribing of Something Else”: Anti-phallogocentrism........................141 5.3 “And What Will I Say to That?”: Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien.................145 5.4 The “Troubles”...............................................................................................155 5.5 Troubled Writing and the Proto-post-national...............................................160 5.6 “The Ache of Times Changing”: Field Day and The Portable Virgin..........172 5.7 A “Strangely Distorted Economy”.................................................................179 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................189 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................192 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 General Introduction This dissertation tells a number of different stories at once. Examining the numerous artistic, historical and theoretical concerns that, for the past century, have shaped the Irish short story, the Irish nation and the body of criticism that interprets and mediates between the two, these five chapters privilege the multiple over the singular, the indeterminate over the definite. My aim here is at once to narrate the evolution of an enduringly protean form of literary expression and to reclaim that very proteanism from a diverse range of critical perspectives that each has posited its own fixed and singular conception of Irish culture, legislated for the expression of Irish cultural identity and vied with its combatants for control over the idea of “Irishness.” In the fight for Irish identity, I argue, the short story often has been a potent weapon, but perhaps just as often it has been a battleground: a tool with which Irish writers have mounted their resistance to the status quo, but also a site over which the establishment in various guises has sought continually to exert its influence. In Ireland, as I will show, the prevailing critical narrative of the short story’s emergence, evolution and ongoing literary purpose has been bound up in complicated ways with the political