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Another Way Out: Women in Kate O'Brien's Fiction
Homolková, Šárka ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
Kate O'Brien was one of Ireland's best female writers; moreover, she was one of the first to centre on the Catholic Middle Class in her writing, as this class was long neglected. O'Brien was famous for her women-oriented books in which she portrayed the lives of women of the rising bourgeoisie of Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We can trace a certain development in O'Brien's writing, throughout her career she becomes more radical and comes to voice feminist notions about women being equal to men as well women's seeking independence from the world dominated by men. Most of her novels are family-oriented and may be called Bildungsromans as the protagonists, which apart from two books are all female, develop and grow to maturity and learn to understand the world and their place in it. As this thesis examined how the women in O'Brien's novels reflect the situation of women in her home country, it is apparent that throughout her life the writer became more radical and sceptical towards the fate of women in Ireland. Therefore, in her first written pieces she portrays women in their traditional roles as dutiful wives, daughters, or mothers. It is only in her later writing that the women manage to emancipate themselves and lead their lives independently. In O'Brien's first two...
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Polarities in the Works of Oscar Wilde
Burianová, Petra ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Reading through the works of Oscar Wilde, one soon notices the many instances of polarity: the recurring themes of the body versus soul, good versus evil, city versus nature, artificial versus natural and many more. It is to be found in his plays as well as in his prose and fairy- tales. Yet these polarities do not necessarily have to oppose each other: the Wildean dialectic allows contraries to coexist, and thus we have the Star-Child who, through repentance, turns from evil to good; however this turn of character does not ensure a happy-ending, and makes us question whether "good really is good". A great number of Wilde's characters either live a double-life, have two distinct sides to their personality, or even several personalities, and in the case of Dorian Gray the split is literal. What led the author to constantly toy with this motif is a question worth examining. In Wilde's case, the artist's life cannot be entirely separated from his works since so much of what he was and what formed him is reflected in the texts he wrote. His statement that "what people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities" (Ransome, 162) shows that for Wilde, truth was not the opposite of "lie", but there may have been several different versions of truth. His aesthetic views,...
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Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Normal People from the Perspective of Marxist Literary Criticism
Vanišová, Veronika ; Topolovská, Tereza (advisor) ; Higgins, Bernadette (referee)
This diploma thesis examines Sally Rooney's novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People from the viewpoint of Marxist literary criticism. Based on the author's own claim to incorporate "a Marxist framework" into her writing as a way of describing the surrounding world, the thesis, there- fore, aims to explore the aforementioned novels with regard to Marx's theory. The first part focuses on the theoretical background and principal thoughts of Marxism and Marxist literary criticism. Next, there is outlined the conception of social classes in Ireland and a brief introduction of Sally Rooney's views in order to provide context to the novels. The second part of the thesis then applies the theoret- ical background to an analysis of the novels themselves. This includes their stories, settings, charac- ters and conveyed ideas in relation to the issues of base and superstructure, power dynamics, class identity, social status and influences of economic as well as cultural and educational hegemony.
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The Barrytown Trilogy: Roddy Doyle's Portrayal of Dublin Working Class at the Turn of the 1990s
Nováková, Alena ; Chalupský, Petr (advisor) ; Topolovská, Tereza (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the depiction of working-class Dublin in Roddy Doyle's first three novels, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, known as The Barrytown Trilogy. The first part of the thesis provides a short overview of Doyle's early work in the context of modern Irish fiction with a focus on working-class protagonists and outlines Ireland's and specifically Dublin's cultural and economic background in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The second part is based on a comparative analysis of the three books in which the author celebrates everyday life in Barrytown, a fictitious neighbourhood in the north of Dublin, through the eyes of a typical working-class family. One section is also dedicated to the language of the trilogy used as a means of achieving greater authenticity. KEYWORDS Roddy Doyle, The Barrytown Trilogy, The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van, Irish literature, Dublin, working class, family, 1980s, 1990s
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The Reception of Irish Literature and Drama in Czech Translation
Laurincová, Alžběta ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Markus, Radvan (referee)
1 Abstract The main aim of the thesis is to introduce the problematics of Czech translations from Irish literature published in the Czech Lands in the period between 1945 - 2014. The author of the thesis provides the list of the authors that were translated in the Czech Lands in that period, and comments upon the literary tradition related to it. Due to the extensive amount of works, the thesis is divided into several chapters, introducing four specific periods: 1945 - 1948 (the end of WWII - the beginning of the Soviet control), 1949 - 1968 (Soviet control - the occupation of the Troops of Warsaw Pact), 1969 - 1989 (the occupation - Velvet Revolution) and 1989 - 2014 (Velvet Revolution - "Velvet Divorce" - the present day). In each chapter the historic introduction is provided mainly to foreshadow the context of the whole era. The discussion about the translations from Irish literature consists from general list of works by individual authors and comments upon their presence at the Czech literary market, the frequency of publishing, the reception of individual authors etc. The author also considers the socio-political occurences that might have influenced the final shape of the Irish-Czech literary canon, and, when possible, tries to demonstrate the extent of such influence.
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The Liturgy of Revolution: Political Theory of Patrick Pearse between Catholicism and Modernism
Ruczaj, Maciej ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Markus, Radvan (referee) ; Ní Ghaibhí, Róisín (referee)
Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 is widely recognized as an example of an intersection between nationalism and religion due to its use of the Christian symbolism of redemption via sacrifice. The religious aura, surrounding its leader and main ideologue, Patrick Pearse, was both a source of his posthumous "triumph" - the Irish independence shaped to a large extent by his legacy, and his "black legend" of the spiritual father of the sectarian violence in the twentieth century Irish politics. Due to the high degree of politicization of the debate over Pearse's role in Irish history, his intellectual legacy was rarely treated sine ira et studio. After a delineation of the problematic legacy of Pearse in the context of Irish Studies and the general introduction to the theme of the relations between nationalism and religion, this work proceeds to the re-examination of the place of religion in Pearse's thought. Pearse's conceptualization of Irish nationalism should be perceived as a synthesis emerging from the interplay between his deep indebtedness to the religious mind-frame and the Romantic and modernist influences that shaped the atmosphere of the pre-1914 Europe. It is based on a structural analogy between the Church and the nation. The analogy is created by means of a mechanism of the transposition of...
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Polarities in the Works of Oscar Wilde
Burianová, Petra ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Reading through the works of Oscar Wilde, one soon notices the many instances of polarity: the recurring themes of the body versus soul, good versus evil, city versus nature, artificial versus natural and many more. It is to be found in his plays as well as in his prose and fairy- tales. Yet these polarities do not necessarily have to oppose each other: the Wildean dialectic allows contraries to coexist, and thus we have the Star-Child who, through repentance, turns from evil to good; however this turn of character does not ensure a happy-ending, and makes us question whether "good really is good". A great number of Wilde's characters either live a double-life, have two distinct sides to their personality, or even several personalities, and in the case of Dorian Gray the split is literal. What led the author to constantly toy with this motif is a question worth examining. In Wilde's case, the artist's life cannot be entirely separated from his works since so much of what he was and what formed him is reflected in the texts he wrote. His statement that "what people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities" (Ransome, 162) shows that for Wilde, truth was not the opposite of "lie", but there may have been several different versions of truth. His aesthetic views,...
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Another Way Out: Women in Kate O'Brien's Fiction
Homolková, Šárka ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
Kate O'Brien was one of Ireland's best female writers; moreover, she was one of the first to centre on the Catholic Middle Class in her writing, as this class was long neglected. O'Brien was famous for her women-oriented books in which she portrayed the lives of women of the rising bourgeoisie of Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. We can trace a certain development in O'Brien's writing, throughout her career she becomes more radical and comes to voice feminist notions about women being equal to men as well women's seeking independence from the world dominated by men. Most of her novels are family-oriented and may be called Bildungsromans as the protagonists, which apart from two books are all female, develop and grow to maturity and learn to understand the world and their place in it. As this thesis examined how the women in O'Brien's novels reflect the situation of women in her home country, it is apparent that throughout her life the writer became more radical and sceptical towards the fate of women in Ireland. Therefore, in her first written pieces she portrays women in their traditional roles as dutiful wives, daughters, or mothers. It is only in her later writing that the women manage to emancipate themselves and lead their lives independently. In O'Brien's first two...
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A Comparison of Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen
Synková, Blanka ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
This thesis compares short stories by the New Zealand-born author Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) and the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), namely Mansfield's short story collection Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and Bowen's The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945). It aims to offer a relatively complex view: it discusses the form as well as the content of the short stories, illustrating the arguments with concrete examples from the short stories, famous ones as well as less known; it suggests various influences that may reflect in the short stories, it offers opinions of notable critics on the individual authors and it also occasionally mentions the authors' own opinions on their work and literature in general. There are three chapters in the body of the thesis. One of them provides contextual information about the possible influences that may have shaped the authors' writing as well as about some critical approaches to their work. The other two chapters analyse the form and content of the stories, respectively. The discussion of formal aspects of Mansfield's and Bowen's short stories focuses on various features of the short stories that may be described as impressionist or lyrical, and on technical devices that may be compared to film. The analysis of content is concerned especially...
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Ironic Myths and Broken Images: Reflections of the 1798 Rebellion in Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction and Drama
Markus, Radvan ; Pilný, Ondřej (advisor) ; Procházka, Martin (referee) ; Mac Craith, Micheal (referee)
The 1798 Irish rebellion together with the preceding decade is justly regarded as a watershed event in the forming of Irish national identity. Therefore it is not surprising that it has inspired numerous, and often conflicting, interpretations in both historiography and literature. This study concentrates on both English- and Irish-language historical novels and plays written about the rebellion in the course of the twentieth century, especially after the year 1916. Attention is drawn to the interpretations of the event contained in these literary works, comparing them to the various views of 1798 as they have evolved in Irish historiography. As the rebellion, especially from the 1970s onward, has been increasingly seen in the light of the later conflict in Northern Ireland, this connection has an important place in the analysis. On the theoretical level, the thesis draws from the findings of Hayden White, who has famously questioned the border between historiographical and fictional treatments of historical events. At the same time, this relativism is complemented by selected features of the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, who highlighted the inevitable ethical questions connected to representations of history. In accordance with the theoretical preliminaries, the study explores the relative value of...
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