| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 91 === Eavan Boland’s “Colony” explores an Irish woman poet’s identity loss in womanhood and authorship in the postcolonial Ireland and unveils the poet’s attempt to reconstruct her identity through exposing and deconstructing the dual colonial rhetoric mapped by England and by Irish patriarchal literary tradition in the conceptualization of national history, place, language, and gender. “Colony” presents a dual colonialism imposed on an Irish woman poet─one by Imperial Britain, and the other by the Irish patriarchal literary system. The dual colonialism is constructed based on the cartographic rhetoric of mapping, including the stratagem of reinscription, enclosure, and hierarchization of space. The reinscription of dichotic colonial rhetorical power leads to a confined and hierachized space that marginalizes and excludes the colonized. Consequently, the discursive map under the mechanism of cartographic rhetoric becomes a means of acquiring, maneuvering, and reinforcing colonial power. To deconstruct the hegemonic dual colonial map, Boland defines a postcolonial Irish identity as a fragmented, ambiguous, and even contradictory one. Chapter one deals with the construction and deconstruction of the rhetoric of the English colonial mapping. Chapter two presents the colonial mapping of Irish patriarchal literary tradition from bardic poetry to nationalist poetic works, which dehumanizes womanhood into national symbols or into literary muses. Chapter three argues that Boland employs the poetics of absence, gap, fragmentation, and contradictions to reconstruct and yet twice denies the identity of a postcolonial Irish woman poet. The thesis concludes that Boland’s essentialist definition of a postcolonial Irish woman poet in “Colony” constitutes another colonial map.
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