"The Lives that Men Should Live": Masculinities in Mid-Twentieth Century Irish Fiction and Culture, 1931-1965

The main aims of my thesis are twofold: firstly, to identify and investigate the components that made up constructions of post-colonial Irish masculinity as illustrated across mid-century Irish fiction. Secondly, to analyse how mid-century fiction treated topics of masculinity; whether they rejected conventional types of masculinity or bolstered state axioms on how Irish men should be. Therefore, a significant drive in my research is to situate the novelistic depictions of masculinity within the context of national discourses on Irish manhood. The first decade after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 was a period of intense nation-building, designed to define the character of the Irish nation and its people after centuries of colonial rule. These attempts at establishing the moral character were achieved by legislative means, the normalisation of Catholic values into everyday practice, and the promotion of an Irish literary culture that bolstered State orthodoxies on the ideal Irish moral citizen. Due to the Irish nationalist perception of masculinity as being under threat from the effeminising effects of British colonialism, a crucial motivation behind these narratives of independence and the formation of national character was to re-construct a sense of Irish masculinity that was deemed to be undermined and emasculated. New laws were designed to enshrine the role of men and women into the legal backbone of the country while cultural practices of Catholic morality were ritualised and codified into the Irish psyche. My research in this thesis considers the fiction published between 1931-1965, allowing for a 7-year buffer between the enactment of the Irish Constitution Bunreacht na hEireann in 1937 and the end of the First Programme for Economic Development in 1965. In my analysis, I consider the first decade of the Irish Free State and later Irish Republic, declared in 1949. I, therefore, consider the manipulation of masculinity in nation-building discourses that followed the revolutionary period and outline how these discourses on post-colonial Irish identity impacted understandings of Irish manhood.