"Starving but wonderfully attractive": Representations of the Peasant in Irish Literature from 1890 to 1950

1905年，J.M.辛格在参观了梅奥县西海岸后写道，当地居民“饥饿，但非常有吸引力”，摆脱了城市现代主义的“双下巴庸俗”。农民的审美价值和他们的物质匮乏之间的并列构成了20世纪初爱尔兰文学中的一个至关重要的张力。我的论文将展示，从1890年到1950年，“农民”是如何象征性地成为新兴民族国家文化话语的中心。无论是指拥有土地的农民、没有土地的劳动者、流浪者和流浪者，还是外来务工人员，农民始终被动员起来，作为一种“基本的”伊斯兰身份，通过这种身份，一种另一种形式的国家身份可以被想象出来，并在广泛的文学文本中得到阐明。然而，农民的文学形象瓦解了一个欠发达、贫困和激进的社会动荡的复杂现实。虽然一些作家，如W.B.叶芝和奥古斯塔·格雷戈里夫人，选择将农民构建为爱尔兰社会的伪阶层，但本博士将试图理解和划分文学中对农民的描述中所包含的各种和不断变化的社会阶层。此外，这些想象的未来在意识形态上是多种多样的，也是截然不同的。农民并不是爱尔兰本质的具体象征，而是一个混杂的人物，充斥着那个时代的不同意识形态。我的博士学位将研究在一个巨大的政治动荡时期，农民不同表现形式中出现的连续性和间断性如何揭示作者的意识形态忠诚。该项目将侧重于这一时期出现的三种不同的农民表现形式。首先，我的研究将考察爱尔兰文学复兴时期农民作为乌托邦人物的建构。通过研究W·B·叶芝、奥古斯塔·格雷戈里夫人和J·M·辛格的作品，我将展示农民的这种表现如何为占优势的作家提供了机会，将封建的贵族过去重新配置为爱尔兰政治未来的乌托邦模式。其次，我将追溯农民的形象如何萦绕在詹姆斯·乔伊斯和塞缪尔·贝克特的城市、都市作品中，考察这两位作家是如何被迫解决和解构爱尔兰农民的文化神话的。最后，我将集中讨论“反复兴”的作家，如弗兰·奥布莱恩和帕特里克·卡瓦纳。这一部分将考察这些作家如何动员农民的形象，将其作为对爱尔兰自由国家意识形态限制的异议和抵抗的场所。虽然许多评论家，如黛博拉·弗莱明和艾伦·吉利斯，研究了爱尔兰农村工人阶级和中产阶级的表现，以及他们与这一时期某些作家的关系，但没有对农民和塑造爱尔兰作家对20世纪农村工人阶级着迷的特定历史和意识形态力量进行实质性研究。我相信，我的研究将弥补这种学术缺失，在一系列文学文本中从不同的批评角度考察无处不在的农民形象。我相信，我的研究提供了重新思考有关爱尔兰现代主义的一些基本信念的机会。虽然爱尔兰现代主义通常被认为是一种城市或世界性的现象，特别是当乔伊斯和贝克特被讨论时，但农村农民的形象最清楚地揭示了那个时期发挥作用的动态的思想、政治和文化动力。通过考察对农民的文学表现，以及对爱尔兰农村工人阶级的政治、社会学和经济研究，我认为，对这一边缘人物的博士研究提供了一个重要的机会，可以重新评估对爱尔兰现代主义的既定理解。

Following a visit to the western coast of County Mayo in 1905, J.M. Synge wrote that the local population were 'starving, but wonderfully attractive', removed from the 'double-chinned vulgarity' of urban modernism. The juxtaposition between the aesthetic value of the peasant, and their material deprivation constituted a vital tension in Irish literature during the early twentieth century. My thesis will show how, from 1890 to 1950, the 'peasant' was symbolically central to the cultural discourse of the emerging nation-state. Whether referring to land-owning farmers, landless laborers, vagrants and wanderers, or migrant workers, the peasant was consistently mobilised as a figure of 'essential' Irishness through which an alternative form of nationhood could be imagined and articulated in a broad array of literary texts. However, the literary avatar of the peasant collapsed a complex reality of underdevelopment, impoverishment, and radical social upheaval. Whilst some writers, such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, chose to construct the peasantry as a pseudo-stratum of Irish society, this PhD will attempt to understand and demarcate the various and shifting social gradations encapsulated in literary depictions of the peasant. Furthermore, these imagined futures were ideologically varied and disparate. Rather than functioning as a concrete symbol of an essential Ireland, the peasant instead emerges as a hybrid figure imbued with the divergent ideologies of the period. My PhD will examine how the continuities and discontinuities that arise in different representations of the peasant disclose an author's ideological allegiances during a period of enormous political upheaval. The project will focus on three distinct representations of the peasant that arose during the period. Firstly, my research will examine the construction of the peasant as a utopian figure during the Irish Literary Revival. By examining the works of W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge, I will demonstrate how this representation of the peasant offered Ascendancy writers the opportunity to reconfigure the feudal, aristocratic past as a utopian model of Ireland's political future. Secondly, I will trace how the figure of the peasant haunts the otherwise urban, metropolitan works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, examining how both writers are compelled to address and deconstruct the cultural myth of the Irish peasant. Finally, I will focus on writers of the "Counter-Revival", such as Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh. This section will examine how these writers mobilised the figure of the peasant as a site of dissent and resistance to the ideological strictures of the Irish Free State. Whilst numerous critics, such as Deborah Fleming and Alan Gillis, have examined representations of the rural Irish working and middle classes, and their relation to certain authors during the period, there is no substantial study on the peasant and the specific historical and ideological forces that shaped Irish writers' fascination with the rural working class during the twentieth century. I believe that my research will remedy this lack of scholarship, examining the ubiquitous figure of the peasant in a range of literary texts and from a variety of critical perspectives. I believe my research offers the opportunity to reconsider some of the fundamental beliefs about Irish modernism. Whilst Irish modernism is often considered an urban or cosmopolitan phenomenon, particularly when Joyce and Beckett are discussed, it is the figure of the rural peasant which most clearly reveals the dynamic ideological, political, and cultural drives at play during the period. By examining literary representations of the peasant alongside political, sociological, and economic studies of the Irish rural working class, I believe that a doctoral-length study of this peripheral figure offers a vital opportunity to reassess established understandings of Irish modernism.