Communal Crisis: Home, Housing, and the Politics of Space in Irish Working-Class Literature Open Access
McGlynn, Rebecca (Spring 2020)
Abstract
This dissertation, “Communal Crisis: Home, Housing, and the Politics of Space in Irish Working-Class Literature,” explores the burgeoning canon of working-class Irish literature as it intersects with theories and questions on the meanings of “home” and “housing.” Often relegated to the margins of the Irish literary canon, working-class literature offers some of the most radical destabilizations of twentieth-and-twenty-first-century social and political policy in Ireland, specifically policy focused on issues of housing and welfare. By recognizing the distinct ways in which explicitly working-class authors highlight the social otherness of their communities I explore why, specifically, representations of “home” and “housing” appear as the most consistently diverse facets of working-class literary activism. The dissertation focuses predominantly on novels, poetry, and drama from authors who explicitly identify as working-class.
While the work of constructing a working-class canon has already started critics have yet to study around the representation of “home” and “housing” in working-class Irish literature. “Home,” on the one hand, refers to an ideological space or location primarily constructed through the literary imagination. “Housing,” on the other hand, considers more specifically the physical type of abode in which the characters under examination reside, and the way the social and political scope of these spaces manifest in each authors’ narrative techniques. Using these terms as lenses, “Communal Crisis” reads texts for moments of social and political resistance, rage, and grief, thus opening up new conversations about the agency and dignity of Ireland’s working classes.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
At Home at the Writing Table
Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………………...17
Community, Housing, and the (Un)Ideal Marriage: Tracing the Evolution of the Working-Class Woman in Irish Literature
Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………...59
Communal Domicide: Hope, History, and Housing in the Estates of Ballymun and Divis
Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………….……..102
Time, Space, and the Artist in Karl Parkinson’s Working-Class Künstlerroman
Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………….……...139
Dem an us Thari Crossways: Counter-Poetic Strategies and Opacity in the work of Emmet Kirwan, Rachael Hegarty and Melatu Uche Okorie
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………175
About this Dissertation
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