Faculty of Humanities
School of Languages
Department of English
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Prof Andries Wessels of the Department of English contributed a chapter to the book Molly Keane Centenary Essays entitled “Resolving history: negotiating the past in Molly Keane's Big House novels”. The collection has been hailed as an important contribution to Irish literary studies.
Keane was one of the most significant twentieth-century proponents of the Big House Novel genre – characterized by the use of exaggeration for humorous effect, a near obsession with lists, and a strong sense of satire - which traces the vicissitudes of the Anglo-Irish ruling class and its decline in modern Ireland. Keane's novels are overtly humorous, even though her comedy can be quite dark.
Twentieth-century Anglo-Irish novelists like Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor and Keane used the Big House novel to demonstrate how the Protestant Ascendancy, who dominated Ireland over centuries through the oppression of the native Irish, themselves became the victims of the paralyzing hold of this history of oppression.
Wessels found that Keane reveals her characters, who are faced with a choice between internal exile in the land of their birth and a harsh adjustment to the culture of the New Ireland, as courageous enough to “emigrate” psychologically from the Old to the New Ireland, resolving the claims of a glamorous but incapacitating history and embracing an unglamorous but self-determined present. Keane postulates divestment of a mythic past as a first prerequisite for the investment of a mature, energetic self.
Commenting on his findings, Keane scholar Vera Kreilkamp states that while Wessels “acknowledges that many of Keane's works operate within the tradition of Anglo-Irish decline, he notes a competing narrative of history in both early and late works [and] finds that Keane creates characters who negotiate with history, moving out of its ‘debilitating shadow’ of glamour to find ‘a legitimate place in contemporary Ireland’”
Contact person: Prof JA Wessels.
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