The hero of hiberniamasculinity in 20th and 21st century irish literature through corpus stylistics

Resumen

The heroic figure in Irish fiction has had its importance in the creation of Irish literature throughout the 20th and 21st century twofold: firstly, with the creation of a self-image against the British rule through myths and legends that supported the idea that Irishness was an identity trait completely opposite to that of Englishness, and secondly, as propaganda to stir up people’s minds in the birthing of that new common Irish identity. Since the Irish Literary Revival, new generations drank from these beliefs. These were passed onto the educational and cultural formation of notions of an immanent nationality that bracketed together essential “Irishness,” the promotion of figures like “the Gael” (Nandy, 1983), and heroes like Brian Boru or Cúchulainn (cf. Cairns & Richards, 1991; McMahon, 2008; Valente, 2011). These images of a self-sacrificing and honourable male character can be considered in itself a stereotype of “hypermasculinity” in Irish culture which is also the standard hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005). Hence, masculinities that do not conform to the heroic and hypermasculine norm are marginalised, rejected, and othered. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to study how this aforementioned heroic identity has affected the representation of male characters through an interdisciplinary methodology. Language and literature are analysed in contemporary Irish fiction through a selection of novels written by 20th- and 21st-century male Irish authors. The data collected resulted in the creation of The Corpus of Contemporary Male Irish Writers (CCMIW) with over 1 million words comprised in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et. al, 2004). The combination of methodologies such as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and more specifically, corpus stylistics has allowed this dissertation to pay attention to linguistic features that follow a pattern of both behaviour and speech in the male characters of the corpus. On the one hand, in the more literary analysis of the CCMIW, a number of common mythological features were analysed: violent outbursts or Cúchulainn’s Fury, the ability of bestowing names to others, the loss of one’s identity, prophetic or supernatural forces that suddenly appear in the text, and the appearance of a helper. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis through corpus stylistics dives into several features from corpus linguistics with which to analyse the CCMIW such as concordance lines, Corpus Query Language (CQL), clusters, or frequency lists. Through these linguistic features, the male-characters’ language was analysed to determine whether their language was somehow gendered and in what manner. Therefore, several linguistics aspects were researched: firstly, the usage of male vocatives and how these terms of address were used as a sign of respect or not; secondly, verbs of speech in direct conversation were studied and classified in a taxonomy of domination or subordination in interaction; finally, I looked at body language and verbs of movement and the relationship that male characters achieve through these nonverbal interactions. In sum, this dissertation aims to link interdisciplinary methodologies that unite quantitative with qualitative studies in order to demonstrate the common heroic features in male characters across a number of novels. At the same time, this analysis could provide more visibility to other models of masculinity rather than the hegemonic heroic one and a possible shift in the creation of male Irish characters toward something other than the established and traditional norm.