Abstract
This thesis explores the concept of Irishness in terms of gander and language. My study focuses on the historical reality of the Great Famine and its consequences. From the post-colonial perspective, my study presents the British government’s inhumanity in saving the hungry country. Chapter One examines Gaelic Revival as both a burgeoning of national consciousness against British cultural hegemony. Chapter Two adopts Homi Bhabha’s idea of Mimicry to analyze Irish males’ frustrated masculinity. My study presents that Irish men mimic the pattern of colonial oppression to regain the lost masculine dignity. In terms of gender relationship, this study argues that Irish females were doubly-marginalized. From the perspective of gender and post-colonial studies, I present the significance of women was trivialized. Chapter Three discusses the conversational aberrations in Dubliners by employing Bill Ashcroft’s concept of appropriation and abrogation of languages. Linguistic errors reveal that another culture has existed before the British one. The aberrant usage of standard English presents that the imperial language cannot be completely accommodated into the British form of presentation. From the point of narrative politics, Joyce’s writing strategy presents the impossibility of imperial cultural assimilation. Hence, the characters’ conversational errors open the door of liberation. Resisting to fix Ireland to a typical image, my research focuses that Joyce initiates a new conception of Irishness, which rejects to marginalize other cultures and to be marginalized. Joyce visualizes a mother Ireland inclusive of hybrid cultural values.