Nationalism, gender and hybridity in Spenser, Yeats and Heaney

This thesis explores the development and interrelationships of nationalism and gender between Ireland and England from postcolonial and feminist viewpoints in the works of Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), William B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Seamus Heaney (1939-). Spenser's The Faerie Queene and A View of the Presente State of Irelande exhibit the development of English "self-fashioning" against or "contrary" to an Irish "other." The works of Yeats and Heaney illustrate the postcolonial effort to re-constitute or re-fashion an Irish "self" against an English "other." Nationalism and myth are reciprocally linked to the repression and feminization of the "other." These concepts are used not only by the patriarchal colonizer to subject the colonial abroad and the women at home but by the postcolonial subject to reconstitute the "self" in a new form against the contrary of some new "other."...