Challenging the national paradigm : working-class identity in the contemporary Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish novel

• Main Author: Meffen, Katherine
• Published: University of Aberdeen 2006
• Subjects: 820.90091
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487425

This thesis contends that a critical approach to novels from the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Northern Ireland focused on the national scale alone has led to neglect of literary representations of working-class identity. It focuses critical attention on the chosen novelists' concern with class, as opposed to national, identity. In approaching class as a cultural construct as well as socio-economic category, this work separates several aspects of the formation of individual identity, namely language, history and geography. Chapter 1 examines the link between social class and non-standard English in the representation of working-class identity in Roddy Doyle's The Snapper and James Kelman's A Disaffection and How Late It Was, How Late, with an analysis based on Tony Crowley's understanding of Standard English as a class-based dialect. Chapter 2 turns to history, a crucial component of any group identity, and examines the way in which the past is reclaimed from the concerns of national history in order to construct a narrative of working-class historical experience in James Plunkett's Strumpet City and William McIlvanney's Docherty. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to geography. Michel de Certeau's concept of 'habitation', which theorises the links between individual subjectivity and the cultural understanding of place, is used to explore the relationship between class and place in Dermot Bolger's The Journey Home and Alan Warner's The Man Who Walks. Chapter 4 turns to three Northern Irish novels, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Glenn Patterson's Burning Your Own, and Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street, to explore how these authors attempt to represent working-class identity in a territory overwhelmingly understood in terms of two competing ethno-religious nationalisms.