- 154 views
- 264 downloads
"My soul shall spurn them evermore": Revivalist Nationalism and the Dialectics of Joyce’s Ideological Development
-
- Author / Creator
- Hosker, Christopher
-
In this thesis I will argue that James Joyce’s early ideological development and artistic trajectory were in large part guided by his fiercely agonistic relationship and dialectical engagement with the Irish cultural nationalist movement known as the Revival. Expanding upon Marjorie Howes’ claim that Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “inhabits the intellectual structures of the Revival even as he rejects that movement”(265), I will explore the ways in which Joyce’s own agon and engagement with the Revival often led him towards a kind of double movement of “inhabiting” certain general Revivalist “intellectual structures” while heavily revising or outright repudiating their particular Revivalist contents. More specifically, I will show how Joyce followed the Revivalist example of viewing Ireland as suffering from a kind of cultural malaise after the fall of Parnell; of seeking to forge a new national identity for the modern Irish; and of creatively engaging with and trying to reclaim and repurpose Irish cultural history. I will also show how Joyce “inhabited” these general interpretive forms in ways that were often explicitly anti-Revivalist. Moreover, I will contribute to the broader critical conversation regarding Joyce’s supposed nationalist and/or cosmopolitan allegiances, arguing that although the teenage Joyce may have espoused a kind of cosmopolitan aestheticism—an ideology ostensibly antithetical to Revivalist nationalism, and, thus, one that the young Joyce likely adopted, at least in part, as an act anti-Revivalist defiance—by the time Joyce wrote “The Dead,” he had begun to recognize the deficiencies of his youthful ideology, to recognize the merits of Revivalism, to synthesize these ideologies within himself, and to acknowledge the formative influence the Revival had had on his development as an artist, intellectual, and cosmopolitan Irishman.
-
- Subjects / Keywords
-
- Graduation date
- Fall 2019
-
- Type of Item
- Thesis
-
- Degree
- Master of Arts
-
- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.