English, Bridget
(2014)
Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel:
Studies in Form and Meaning from James Joyce
to Anne Enright.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This dissertation examines how the modern Irish novel negotiates shifting cultural
conceptions of death and dying across the twentieth century. Analyzing a cross-section of
important novels — James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel
Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks and Anne Enright’s The Gathering
— my study will argue that the Irish novel has long grappled with the meaning of life and
death in a world where religious and secular conceptions of the nature of life and death have
continually intersected and conflictually coexisted. Though sometimes viewed as a wholly
secular form, the novel in the Irish context has struggled to reconcile Catholic views of life
and death that stress the importance of a “good death” and the rewards of eternity with
secular worldviews that stress the importance of personal fulfillment in this life and that see
death as a final and absolute ending. The novel genre may be secular in its general tendency,
but it is also a dialogic form that puts antagonistic conceptions of death and dying into
contention with each other, and it is the conflict between these colliding conceptions of death
that lends modern Irish narrative fiction much of its interest.
The story of death and dying in the Irish novel is not simply one of declining
Catholicism and rising secularism. This study shows that while Irish Catholic notions of
death and dying were always challenged by alternative secular value systems, these secular
value systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to religious notions of
death.
Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel is part of a wider body of criticism that
deal with the meaning and function of death in the modern novel such as Garrett Stewart’s
Death Sentences: Style of Dying in British Fiction and Frederick Hoffman’s The Mortal No:
Death and the Modern Imagination. This study makes a distinctive contribution to this
scholarship by focusing on the specific way that death shapes the structure, form and
development of the Irish novel and how these novelistic depictions interrogate existing
cultural attitudes towards death and dying.
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