W. B. Yeats and James Joyce: Creating a unified Irish literary tradition

This dissertation disrupts the representation of Irish literary history as divided. In this study, I contend that Yeats and Joyce forged not two Irish literary traditions, hostile and dichotomous to each other, but instead a unified and complementary, albeit multivalent and complicated, Irish literary tradition. In fact, this dissertation maintains that scholars have misrepresented the relationship between the works of the two writers and have ignored common themes and figures in the works of Yeats and Joyce in order to facilitate cultural and literary studies of Irish tradition. This misrepresentation has, in turn, complicated and confused Irish scholarship and Irish writers in each subsequent generation.; In contrast to what the scholars portray, Yeats and Joyce establish a complementary set of themes, beliefs, and figures that creates a complex and complete literary tradition, one that represents Ireland and the Irish as complicated and multifaceted possessors of a literary tradition through themes of myth, heroism, religion, nationalism, and sexuality. Yeats and Joyce represent both mythological and religious symbols for the Irish only to question and to dismantle them in order to represent the physical, sexual, and psychological realism that will place Irish works within the modernist tradition. They appropriate the traditions of an oral and a literary culture and transform them into a unifying tradition for Ireland.; As neither Yeats nor Joyce could completely identify with the dying Gaelic culture or accept the imposition of an English one, they accommodated both and used the fragmentation of Irish literature as a metaphor for the reality of the modern condition. While Irish literature may be fragmented on political, nationalistic, and religious lines, the two writers transcended these boundaries as neither derived his themes and beliefs from within the confines of the religious and political establishment. They create a complete tradition by presenting all aspects of the Irish character, society, and life so that the reader, and future writers, may choose from all aspects of Irish tradition in order to create a unique literary representation and history.