Blighted Beginnings: Coming of Age in Independent Ireland

by Jonathon Bolton

Overview

"Blighted Beginnings": Coming of Age in Independent Ireland offers a much needed examination of the manner in which narratives of emerging selfhood were used persistently by authors in order to critique and reform problems that have plagued post-independence Ireland.

The study begins by examining the struggles peculiar to the generation that either came of age during the Irish revolutionary period or immediately after independences whose individual identity-formation coincides with the birth of the Free State. It then looks at how the freedoms of Anglo-Irish children were circumscribed by the traditions of their class, the inheritance of property, and by sectarian prejudice, thereby impeding their maturity, and how the Big House tradition is used both to redress the privilege and colonial abuses of their class and respond to the culture of their resentment that complicated Anglo-Irish life after independence. This study also analyzes how religious vocations, widely encouraged in Ireland, defied the expectations of maturity by insisting upon a renunciation of worldly ambition, an ongoing paternal and institutional dependency, sexual abstinence, and social separation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611483536
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	05/01/2010
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Bolton is associate professor of English at Auburn University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century British and Irish literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Introduction: "Genre and Nation": The European Bildungsroman Tradition and Post-Independence Ireland 9

1 Coming of Age in the Irish Free State: Individual and National Development 27

2 "Big House Bildung": Anglo-Irish Coming-of-Age Narratives 60

3 "Omnibus Omnium": Education, Vocation, and Surrogacy in Irish Coming-of-Age Narratives 94

4 "The Smear of Decency": Courtship and Sexual Initiation in Coming-of-Age Narratives 125

5 "A Land Transformed by Wonder": Coming Out in Ireland 155

6 Unhappy Families: Domestic Discord, the Divorce Debate, and Irish Coming-of-Age Narratives 186

Conclusion: Toward a Postmodern Irish Bildungsroman: Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry 220

Notes 235

Works Cited 252

Index 262

Editorial Reviews

Bolton (Auburn Univ.) offers an exhaustive examination of 'coming of age' novels in 20th-century Ireland....Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice Reviews

Bolton (Auburn Univ.) offers an exhaustive examination of 'coming of age' novels in 20th-century Ireland....Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice

Bolton (Auburn Univ.) offers an exhaustive examination of 'coming of age' novels in 20th-century Ireland....Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

CHOICE