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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Regina Maria Roche’S The Children Of The Abbey: Contesting The Catholic Presence In Female Gothic Fiction, Diane Hoeveler Apr 2012

Regina Maria Roche’S The Children Of The Abbey: Contesting The Catholic Presence In Female Gothic Fiction, Diane Hoeveler

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article examines Regina Maria Roche’s immensely popular gothic novel, The Children of the Abbey (1796), in light of the ideological and political campaigns that occurred in Britain leading up to the passage of the Catholic emancipation bill in 1829. The Children of the Abbey has been the subject of recent critical interpretation by a number of scholars who attempt to argue that it is pro-Catholic. However, by confronting the portrait of her dead mother in the final volume, Roche’s heroine Amanda discovers not a magical representation of the unknowable and inexplicable past that often stands for Catholicism but instead …


Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, And Postnational Identity In Four Novels By Irish Women, 1960-2000, Sarah Nestor Apr 2012

Destabilizing Tradition: Gender, Sexuality, And Postnational Identity In Four Novels By Irish Women, 1960-2000, Sarah Nestor

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation examines four novels that represent Irish women and girls confronting the typical narrative of Irish national identity in the twentieth century. The post-independence construction of Irish national identity depended upon prescriptive roles that aligned with its founders’ beliefs about the nation’s ethnic homogeneity and moral superiority. Irish women’s identity and roles as wives and mothers were imperative to upholding this idea of the nation, particularly its morality. Irish women were therefore charged with maintaining well-defined gender roles and the nuclear family in an effort to define a distinctive Irish identity. Thus, when women’s roles are challenged or changed …