Out of Egypt and into bondage: Exodus in the Irish national imagination

Out of Egypt investigates the privileged place of the biblical trope of Exodus in religious, political, and cultural rhetoric in Ireland, particularly during the anti-colonial struggles of the last century. From the metaphoric identification of the Irish with enslaved Israelites in seventeenth-century bardic poetry, to the imagining of Irish Home Rule leader Charles Stuart Parnell as Moses, to James Joyce's envisioning of the Promised Land as the "new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future," Exodus offered a narrative of liberation that had potency and religious authority. Between 1890 and 1922, the period of intense cultural and political activity beginning with the literary revival and concluding with the achievement of the Free State, Exodus served as the archetypal narrative for the birth of a nation. It was also a contested narrative, and this dissertation traces the changing responses to the Protestant Ascendancy's appropriation of Exodus in an increasingly empowered Catholic Ireland.; The "anomalous condition" of yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt, the culture of the oppressor, that Douglas Hyde invokes in "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland" (1892) is inevitable in anti-colonial struggle, and constitutes one of the most insuperable difficulties to any narrative of the emerging nation. Out of Egypt explores, for example, Lady Gregory's 1911 play The Deliverer, an allegory of the Parnell story set amidst the biblical Exodus: the Irish public's responses to the play offer a complex picture of cultural and political tensions in the period before the Easter Rising. The aesthetic of 1916 eventually replaces Exodus as Ireland's central way of imagining liberation, and this dissertation shows how Patrick Pearse's writings illustrate the movement from an Anglo-Irish, Parnellite, Protestant, Moses-centered narrative to a revolutionary, Catholic, Christ-centered one; from a story of earthly struggle to one of spiritual martyrdom; from a story of inevitable ambivalence to one that insisted, more than ever before, on purity. Finally, I show how Joyce's Ulysses, through a critique and revision of earlier nationalist uses of the rhetoric of Exodus, reveals a nation born in the wilderness---a space that resists the territorial imperative of nationalism.