Little Grocers’ Republic: A crisis of community in the provincial-town fiction of Mary Lavin, John Broderick, and William Trevor

This interdisciplinary thesis identifies ‘crises of community’ in the provincial Irish town fiction of Mary Lavin (1912-1996), John Broderick (1924-1989), and William Trevor (1928-2016). In writing retrospectively to their childhood experiences, they identify the preconditions for economic collapse in the years after the establishment of Saorstát Éireann (1922). This thesis takes into consideration economic history and urban history and draws upon Conrad Arensberg’s and Solon Kimball’s ethnographic study of the Irish country town. This thesis acknowledges the reciprocal dependence of provincial towns upon their rural hinterlands due to the agricultural nature of the Irish economy. Due to the shifting demands of this agricultural economy, and a failure by the Irish state to replace it with alternative economic channels, economic decline and stagnancy characterise the fictional representations explored in this thesis. That stagnancy is framed through Seamus Deane’s contention that celibacy and restraint in terms of sexual propriety reflects the economic sterility of the newly-established Irish Free State. Architectural remnants from previous eras instil Irish towns with an anachronistic atmosphere, and it is this tension between stagnancy and anachronism that defines each author’s ‘crisis of community’, following Raymond Williams conceptualisation. Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ captures how disparate spaces throughout the townscape yield differing movements of time. While predominantly celibate with a stagnant temporality, peripheral, dissonant spaces within the town align with Michel Foucault’s idea of the ‘heterotopia’, regressively inverting the temporality. These anachronistic spaces provide insights into the dynamic of town and hinterland and draw the reader’s attention to previous moments of crisis in the town’s history. This dissertation addresses an oversight in Irish studies research with fictional provincial towns, to date, having escaped sustained critical attention. Furthermore, this thesis vindicates the prescient role of fiction in anticipating subsequent historical or social science analyses on the economic state of Irish towns.

Publisher

University of Galway

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CC BY-NC-ND

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University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)