Celtic Arc Light: The City, Technology, and Irish Modernism

This dissertation argues for an Irish modernism engaged with Dublin's urban technological infrastructure, most potently exemplified by the city's electric lights. This challenges the view that early-twentieth century Irish literature was predominantly romantic and pastoral, and it provides an Irish literary context for James Joyce's urban modernism. It also revises how the city and technology have been understood within modernist criticism, which traditionally places literary experimentation within highly technologized capitals such as Paris. By demonstrating how impoverished, underdeveloped Dublin could cultivate modernism, I argue for need to attend to the social meanings of urban technologies within specific cultures as a prerequisite for pursuing a truly global modernist studies. I place Ireland's experience of technology within the context of its colonial history, a history that undermines the electric light's traditional association with urban modernity. This history could be read into the fact that Dublin's electrified spectacles existed alongside Ireland's slow electrification and its capital's vast slums, as such contiguity of development and underdevelopment betrayed the logic of colonial modernity. I use Ian Baucom's writing on modernism within the global urban periphery to demonstrate how such border zones of development and underdevelopment could generate modernism, and I discuss works by James Joyce and Kenneth Sarr that derive formal innovation from Dublin's paratactic landscape of poverty and plenty. I then offer close readings of three understudied Irish artists who grapple with the urban technological realities of Dublin. Both the modernist alienation and experimentation with narrative voice that mark James Stephens's early urban fiction emerge in response to Dublin's contradictory landscape of electrified thoroughfares and dark slums; he also recasts modernist theories of urban technological shock for colonial realities. Eimar O'Duffy's fiction attempts to imagine through technology a solution to Ireland's urban underdevelopment, highlighting in the process a broader Revival interest in engineering culture. The difficulty of imagining such an alternative technological modernity spurs his later modernism. Finally, Seumas O'Sullivan resets the logic of the Celtic Twilight within Dublin's divided landscape in order to create an Irish modernist fl‰nerie that embraces gaslight as an alternative to electrified modernity.