Thomas Wolfe and the genre question: Beyond the "charge of autobiography"

The North Carolinian author Thomas Wolfe (1900‐1938) has long suffered under the “charge of autobiography,” which lingers to this day in critical assessments of his work. Criticism of Wolfe is frequently concerned with questions of generic classification, but since the 1950s, re‐assessments of Wolfe’s work have suggested that Wolfe’s “autobiographical fiction” exhibits a complexity that merits further investigation. Strides in autobiographical and narrative theory have prompted reconsiderations of texts that defy the artificial boundaries of autobiography and fiction. Wolfe has been somewhat neglected in the canon of American fiction of his era, but deserves to be reconsidered in terms of how he engages with the challenges and contradictions of writing about or around the self. This thesis investigates why Wolfe’s work has been the source of considerable critical discomfort and confusion with regard to the relationship between Wolfe’s life and his writing. It explores this issue through an examination of elements of Wolfe’s work that problematise categorisation. Firstly, it investigates the concept of Wolfe as “storyteller.” It explores the motivations and philosophies that underpin Wolfe’s work and his concept of himself as a teller of tales, and examines aspects of Wolfe’s writing process that have their roots in medieval traditions of the memorisation and recitation of tales. The thesis then conducts a detailed examination of how Wolfe describes the process of transforming his memory into narrative through writing. The latter half of the thesis examines narrative techniques used by Wolfe, firstly analysing his extensive use of the iterative and pseudo‐iterative modes, and then his unusual deployment of narrators and focalization. This project sheds light on elements of Wolfe’s approach to writing and narrative strategies that he employs that have previously been overlooked, and that have created considerable critical confusion with regard to the supposedly “autobiographical” genesis of his work.

A social history of sport in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford, c. 1880-1930

This thesis seeks to explore the development of sport in Munster in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by comparing developments in three counties: Cork, Tipperary and Waterford. In particular this thesis considers the development of rugby and soccer in comparative perspective across these three counties, asking what local factors impacted on their uneven development in the region and considering the extent to which the traditional model of diffusion applies to the reception of these sports in the three counties. By giving consideration to these two particular non-indigenous sports, the thesis will, through answering that question, explore ideas of cultural reception, national identity and class as expressed at local level. These themes will be explored by placing the comparative analysis of these two sports into a wider context of sporting development regionally and nationally in the period, in particular the emerging commercialisation of sport, and also the diverse sporting culture of which these two sports were a part. Utilising a wide range of archival sources from local, national and sporting newspapers, to club records, official publications and ephemera this thesis builds a picture of sport in Munster that is deeply rooted in the community, and that forms an important facet of the social world of Cork, Tipperary and Waterford from 1880-1930.