120130 VO Cultural and Regional Studies: English-Speaking World (405) = Vorlesung M 10 (BA) (2009W)

This course traces the emergence and development of Irish national identity in poetry, fiction and drama written in English from about the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Irish literature in English is often self-consciously Irish; that is, without a separate language to manifest its cultural distinctness from the language and culture of Britain, Irish writing in English frequently presents a sensibility insistent upon difference from Britain. In the earlier period (approximately 1700-1870) such Irish writing is more characteristically political than subtle: in the succeeding era (approximately 1870 to 1950) the literature matures into assurance, with less of the earnest determination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Over the centuries the cultural and political contexts shifted markedly. Ireland's movement toward popular sovereignty and political separation from Britain was also a movement toward a stricter, demotic Catholicism and away from Gaelic culture. At home in Ireland, writers were more popular as they expressed nationalist sentiments, but Irish authors ambitious for a wider audience or dismayed by Catholic rigidities often found it more comfortable to live in Britain. Such shifting contexts inform styles of writing that privilege irony, perhaps the most consistent characteristic of Irish literature in English.
We will be reading works by Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, R. B. Sheridan, Maria Edgeworth, J. C. Mangan, Samuel Ferguson, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey, James Joyce and Flann O'Brien, among others, with particular attention to Irish self-consciousness and the strains of nationalist sentiment. My own theoretical orientation is (mildly) post-colonialist, but I welcome other approaches to reading literature.