Ethical revivals: Discontinuities and moral self-cultivation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Iris Murdoch

This dissertation examines the writings of three authors of Irish extraction---James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Iris Murdoch---to determine how they reacted to the rising tide of nationalism and the subsequent political violence in Ireland between 1900 and 1923 by incorporating both traditional and non-traditional ethical discourses into their fictional works. I argue that each author subtly articulates a unique conception of moral self-cultivation through the depiction of their respective protagonists as a way of bridging the historical discontinuities of this period as well as of situating their works unexpectedly against the Modernist conceit of subjective failure or interruption. My analysis assesses how the themes of education and artistic vocation are used to answer the pressing ethical questions of authenticity, freedom, subjective and collective identity, and communal and civic relations. In terms of method, I apply analytical approaches from normative and applied ethics to the primary texts to reveal the narrative strategies each of the authors employs to embed their fictional works with a measure of ethical discourse. The primary works include Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Bowen's The Last September, and Murdoch's The Red and the Green.