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McAllister Dissertation.pdf (5.48 MB)

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The Early Days of a Better Nation: Imagined Space in Irish and Scottish National Culture, 1960–2000

McAllister, Brian James
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371193431

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
This project comparatively explores late-twentieth-century Scottish and Irish literary texts that re-imagine nationhood through the structures and forms of literary space. The very different but nevertheless interconnected political, economic, and social upheavals experienced by both nations from roughly 1960 through the end of the 20th century reconfigured relationships between national space, national identity, and political sovereignty, inviting speculative explorations beyond the traditional nation-state. Yet, political solutions to these national questions - such as Northern Irish power sharing and Scottish devolution - never abandoned the concept of nationhood, per se. I claim that literary texts that undermine easy access to represented worlds and movement within those worlds serve as speculative and productive sites for this paradoxical move beyond the nation-state through the language of national identity. In other words, these disorienting narrative spaces serve as sites for re-imagining and reconfiguring Scottish and Irish national identities. To outline these disorienting techniques, I consider all levels of narrative space, from the imagined worlds in which narratives take place through movement within those worlds to the physical surfaces on which texts appear. The first two chapters investigate the topographic affordances of genre in Scottish and Irish national contexts, specifically addressing the world-making capacities of science-fiction prose and science-fiction poetry. Chapter 3 shifts from these topographic concerns to plotted movement through narrative space, focusing on disorientations in Samuel Beckett's late prose and James Kelman's Glaswegian fiction. Chapter four explores interactions between texts and the physical surfaces on which they appear, comparing the visual poetry and garden art of Scottish author Ian Hamilton Finlay to the political rhetoric of Northern Irish partisan murals. A brief coda reflects on the possible diachronic changes that occur during this period regarding the relationship between aesthetic space and the nation. The political concerns motivating this transnational study also build upon recent work in Irish-Scottish studies that challenges Anglocentric approaches toward the so-called Celtic fringes of Ireland and Scotland. By decentering discourse about cultural production within Britain and Ireland, this methodology reorients geographic and political regions historically located under the term "British"; and emphasizes the need for a spatially dynamic and formally attentive study of national culture throughout the archipelago.
Brian McHale (Committee Chair)
James Phelan (Committee Member)
Thomas Davis (Committee Member)
David Herman (Committee Member)
282 p.
British and Irish Literature; Literature
Scottish Literature; Irish Literature; British Literature; Nation; Space; Narrative Theory

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McAllister, B. J. (2013). The Early Days of a Better Nation: Imagined Space in Irish and Scottish National Culture, 1960–2000 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371193431

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McAllister, Brian. The Early Days of a Better Nation: Imagined Space in Irish and Scottish National Culture, 1960–2000. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371193431.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McAllister, Brian. "The Early Days of a Better Nation: Imagined Space in Irish and Scottish National Culture, 1960–2000." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371193431

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1371193431
687
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.