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

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.