Anxious states: Violence, modernization, and nationalism in British and Irish literature, 1916--1997

In this project, I examine representations of violence in Irish and Scottish literature produced between Ireland's Easter 1916 Rebellion and Scotland's 1997 Devolution Referendum. By focusing on contemporary representations of violence in work by Irish writers Eavan Boland, John Banville, John McGahern, and Scottish writers James Kelman and William McIlvanney---and by pairing their theories of violence with those of their respective modernist predecessors, including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Edwin Muir, and Hugh MacDiarmid---I explore the relationships between nationalism and modernization to study their collective impact on individual and communal formations of identity. Using representations of violence in modernist and contemporary writing as a lens reveals that the discourses of nationalism and modernization are not contending but intertwined phenomena, articulated within similar colonial networks, each with traumatic effects that problematize their supposed historical achievements. Texts from both countries further suggest that many twentieth-century Irish and Scottish writers pursue a shared ethical query: How might literary forms diagnose and counter violence? To address this issue, each chapter examines a contemporary writer's critique of modernist representations of violence and suggests ways in which these authors transform representations of violence within specific and inherited literary forms, like the Scottish regional novel and mythopoetics in Irish poetry.; For recent Irish and Scottish writers, violence is endemic to the lives of characters observed, very often permitted by models of individual or collective identity that the character normalizes and accepts. Because each author implicitly views violence as unethical, representations of violence thus analyze the adequacy of contemporary models of self and state identity. While violence and its relationship to nationalism, modernization, and colonialism represent this project's central pursuit, other issues include situations of power and subjective desire, the individual's difficult journey towards citizenship, and the struggle among claims made on the protagonist by regional, national, and cosmopolitan forms of affiliation.