| This dissertation studies the figure of the Irish secret agent, a pervasive, yet heretofore unacknowledged trope in the Irish literary tradition. Distinctly different from the literary figure of the domestic Irish informer, the secret agent captures both the vexed nature and tantalizing possibilities of Irish hybridity and the dynamics of ambivalence, secrecy, and treachery born of, as I argue, the paradoxes of allegiance and enfranchisement created by legacies of colonial rule in Ireland and Irish participation in British imperialism. The pervasiveness and flexibility of the secret agent trope throughout the work of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors implies a tradition out of which authors consciously or unconsciously write, just as it signals the ongoing desire to situate the meaning and place of Irishness within larger matrixes of identity---namely, in imperial British, and European contexts---and to understand how those confluences and divergences of alliance function. This project considers authors' representations of Irish secret agency in the context of specific historical crises---such as the Fenian bombing campaigns, the Home Rule movement, Irish independence, World Wars I and II, Ireland's economic transformation and entry into the European Union, and the Troubles---moments that bring Irish and imperial identities into pronounced conflict. Furthermore, it explores the fascinating intersections of fiction and history in connection with this trope, as Irish authors develop through fictive representation, allegory, or inter-textual reference a genealogy of "real-life" Irish icons, including historical figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell, Oscar Wilde, and Roger Casement, who seem to embody the ambivalences and "queered" legacies of Irishness.; Through its examination of the secret agent, my project uncovers new unities in the Irish tradition by considering literary meditations on Irish identity in relation to the British imperial project, a connection that is largely overlooked. In doing so, it claims Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle, often considered merely as English authors of Empire, as distinctively Irish writers as well, whose work can be considered in thematic relation to canonical Irish authors such as W. B. Yeats, Francis Stuart, and John Banville. |
