Women's contribution to the development of the English novel: 1621-1818

Women's contribution to literature is no arbitrary or artificial distinction. However much the reformer may welcome, or the conservative lament, the growth of a harmonious sharing of ideals between men and women, that growth has been a hard-fought struggle. It has been an escape from a prison, which, when it did not entirely shut out the greater world, at least enclosed a little world of education meant for women, literature adapted to the supposed limitations of their intellect, and a course of action prescribed by the other sex. To show how the literary efforts of women developed and justified their claims to free activity is the purpose of this thesis.

The double bind for non-traditional families in post-primary settings; to tell or not to tell their family identity

This thesis involved researching normative family discourses which are mediated through educational settings. The traditional family, consisting of father, mother and children all living together in one house is no longer reflective of the home situation of many Irish students (Lunn and Fahey, 2011). My study problematizes the dominant discourses which reflect how family differences are managed and recognised in schools. A framework using Foucauldian post structural critical analysis traces family stratification through the organisation of institutional and interpersonal relations at micro level in four post-primary schools. Standardising procedures such as the suppression of intimate relations between and among teacher and student, as well as the linear ordering of intergenerational relations, such as teacher/student and adult/child are critiqued. Normalising discourses operate in practices such as notes home which presume two parents together. Teacher assumptions about heterosexual two-parent families make it difficult for students to be open about a family setup that is constructed as different to the rest of the schools'. The management of family difference and deficit through pastoral care structures suggests a school-based politics of family adjustment. These practices beg the question whether families are better off not telling the school about their family identity. My thesis will be of interest to educational research and educational policy because it highlights how changing demographics such as family compositions are mis-conceptualised in schools, as well as revealing the changing forms of family governance through regimes such as pastoral care. This analysis allows for the existence of, and a valuing for, alternative modes of family existence, so that future curricular and legal discourses can be challenged in the interest of equity and social justice.

Prophets of the beast: the modernist esotericism of D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats

This thesis analyses the influence of the esoteric tradition on D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats’ thought and examines both authors’ writings in light of the antidemocratic political religions that emerged during and after their respective careers. While a number of extant studies investigate the connection between modernism and the occult and a number of critics have discussed the importance of antidemocratic politics to modernism, this study is unique in its emphasis on the relationship between modernist esotericism and antidemocratic politics, and in its insistence that the interconnection between the two constitutes a fundamental part of both authors’ world-views. This study calls for the development of a multivalent understanding of modernism, which appears as neither a “cultural movement identifiable with bourgeois, capitalist, paternalist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, and logocentrist ideologies” (Surette 5) nor entirely the opposite; Romantic, feministic, primitivistic and countercultural. Rather, modernism will be shown to have encompassed both of these ideological orientations, effectively operating on a double front in its crusade to establish a new age. This complexity is visible in both Lawrence and Yeats’ work, as both authors advocate a return to traditional structures while simultaneously endeavouring to usher Western civilisation into a new modern paradigm. Although they primarily grounded their writings in a mythico-pastoral discourse that masked the practical implications of their revolutionary agendas, both authors possessed an attraction to Futurist thought and, albeit rarely, showed an awareness that the change they envisioned could not be brought about without a radical intervention in the political and economic sectors – an intervention that would necessarily take place through the medium of the “machine” from which they were often so adamant to distance themselves. This fusion of technophilic and Arcadian thought-currents – dubbed “archeofuturism” by the French right-wing intellectual Guillaume Faye – constitutes the central focus of this discussion of Lawrentian and Yeatsian thought.