Irish writers in Irish America: The evolution of a literary culture and an ethnic identity, 1882-1998

This dissertation explores specific historical situations in which modern Irish writers have intersected with the Irish-American public. Rather than simplifying these intersections by presenting a hagiography of the Irish writers chronicling their heroic virtue in battling what has too often been presented by literary critics, historians and the writers themselves, as nothing more than the philistine prejudices of middle class Catholic reactionaries and/or over-sensitive, jingoistic Irish-American nationalists in the face of true literary art, the dissertation instead documents and analyzes these confrontations as part of larger process of ethnic identity formation. The intellectual light shone on these intersections therefore illuminates the shifting political, religious and cultural concerns and ethnic self-conceptions of Irish America over a substantial and significant period of its development. That period is roughly delineated from 1882, when Oscar Wilde arrived for his lecture tour of North America, to the late 1990s, when Frank McCourt was winning the Pulitzer Prize for Angela's Ashes and Martin McDonagh was being nominated for a Tony Award for The Beauty Queen of Leenane. This period includes William Butler Yeats' first American lecture tour, the arrival of the Abbey Theatre's Irish Players in America, the American trials of James Joyce's Ulysses, and Brendan Behan's residency in New York City during the Broadway run of The Hostage.;Examining these intersections shows that rigid religious and political standards were used to judge Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce and Behan As such, there were remarkably consistent complaints made by Irish Americans against Irish writers for eight decades. But as the more recent examples of McCourt and McDonagh indicate, such litmus tests have disappeared and what is now judged and celebrated is how well an author compares to a long tradition of eloquence, wit, humor, satire, irony, and irreverence.