Creating and destroying 'the man who does not exist': the peasantry and modernity in Welsh and Irish writing

摘要

The literature of both Wales and Ireland in the modern period has used the imagined figure of the peasant to emblematize the nation. Yet the peasant is a contradictory emblem, especially for modernity, since he is associated with the past and with stasis. Consequently, both literary traditions reveal a repeated pattern of creation of an idealized peasantry, followed by its destruction in order to make way for a reinvented form of national identity. To demonstrate this, the early nineteenth-century representations of the Irish peasantry in the work of William Carleton are compared with those of the Welsh peasantry in the work of Anne Beale, followed by a comparison of the constructions of the peasant in the late nineteenth-century Celtic revivals of both countries in the wake of the Blue Books Report in Wales and the Great Famine in Ireland. Finally, the satirical portraits of the peasantry in the twentieth-century short stories of George Moore and Caradoc Evans are considered side by side. Ultimately, the peasant may be seen as embodying the contradictions of nationalism itself in the context of modernity, since the figure contains both residual and emergent cultural formations. Thus, the peasant is continually resurrected in analogous ways by writers in both countries, revealing again the proximity of the Welsh and Irish constructions of cultural nationalism and literary history.