Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Ó Donghaile, D (2018) Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Irish Studies Review. pp. 374-389. ISSN 0967-0882

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Abstract

This essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.” © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Irish Studies Review on 11/06/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09670882.2018.1477480
Uncontrolled Keywords: 20 Language, Communication and Culture
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions: Humanities and Social Science
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Date of acceptance: 6 June 2018
Date of first compliant Open Access: 11 December 2019
Date Deposited: 27 Mar 2019 09:22
Last Modified: 04 Sep 2021 09:34
DOI or ID number: 10.1080/09670882.2018.1477480
URI: https://ljmu-9.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/10426
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