The Irish Peasant Novels of Emily Lawless Hurrish: A Study & Grania: The Story of an Island

Abstract

The Anglo-Irish writer, Emily Lawless (1845 - 1913), has not, in the period following her death, been a very well-known, or widely appreciated, author. At the end of the 19th century though, she was popular with the English reading public, mainly because of her two contemporary Irish peasant novels, Hurrish: A Study and Grania: The Story of an Island, in which she managed to awaken English society to the plight of the impoverished Irish peasant. As Emily Lawless has not been widely studied nor written about only until recently, my access to resources, both primary and secondary, is very much limited. For this reason, I was able to acquire only one of the novels (Hurrish) as a printed publication, while the other novel Grania was available to me only in an electronic version. While William Linn's dissertation "The Life and Works of the Hon. Emily Lawless, First Novelist of the Irish Literary Revival" has been a valuable source of all the details of Lawless's biography and writings in general, the critical articles have been only a few. These include the 1980s first critical "appreciations" after years of neglect, by Elizabeth Grubgeld and Betty Webb Brewer, and more recent essays of James Cahalan, Jacqueline Belanger and Heidi Hansson. This thesis will attempt to introduce the writer in terms of life...

Tato diplomova praee si vytyka za eil zaprve zasadit irskou spisovateIku Emily Lawless, (1845 - 1913), do Iiterarnfho a historieko-poIitickeho kontextu jeji doby a zadruhe detaiIne rozebrat jeji dva romany pojednavajfci 0 soueasnem irskem venkovu a jeho obyvatelfch. Autorka byla ve sve dobe znama, jejf diIa eetl dokonce tehdejsf britsky predseda vIMy, William Gladstone, kdyz si pfipravovaI podklady pro prosazenf easteene vladni samostatnosti pro Irsko v londynskem parlamentu. Anglicka etenarska verejnost prijala oba romany s nadsenim, tehdejsi kritiky hovofily 0 nezaujatosti, s jakou se Lawless podarilo priblfzit tehdejsf irskou realitu a utrpenf irskyeh roIniku anglickemu etenari, a pomoci mu tak lepe pochopit politicke a soeialnf denf v sousednfm Irsku. Zamerem teto prace je pokusit se definovat, jaky obraz irskeho venkovana Lawless vytvarf a porovnat jej s nazory a se ztvarnenimi stejneho tematu jej fmi soueasniky. Irsky venkov se totiz v dobe irskeho "narodniho obrozenf" stal vzorem a vysnenym zakladem pro budouci samostatny mirodni stat. Ponevadz ale zakladem kazdeho mlrodniho statu musf nutne by! presne definovany narod, potYkalo se Irsko v prllbehu celeho devatenaeteho stoletf az do poeatku stoleti dvacateho s otazkou, jak a na eem irskou totoznost postavit. Tuto skuteenost dale stezoval fakt, ze...