Looking for home in all the wrong places: nineteenth-century Australian-Irish women writers and the problem of home-making

Burston, Mary Ann (2009) Looking for home in all the wrong places: nineteenth-century Australian-Irish women writers and the problem of home-making. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

This thesis examines the writing of Irish identity in Australia to explore how nineteenth-century Australian-born women writers negotiated their Irish emigrant heritage. A gap in knowledge about Irish women's emigrant experiences and those of their descendants provides an opportunity to investigate the translation of the Irish emigrant experience from the perspectives of first-born Australian daughters. A critical analysis of the writing histories of Mary Eliza Fullerton, Mary Grant Bruce and Marie Pitt (McKeown) will demonstrate the fragility of national identity in terms of the cultural and symbolic language used to define Irish emigrant and Australian settler culture identity between the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth centuries. The thesis provides an alternative reading of national cultures and histories to show how each writer used images of Irish national culture to clarify and elaborate notions of home in their Australian writing.

Item type Thesis (PhD thesis)
URI https://vuir.vu.edu.au/id/eprint/30089
Subjects Historical > Faculty/School/Research Centre/Department > School of Communication and the Arts
Historical > FOR Classification > 2002 Cultural Studies
Historical > FOR Classification > 2005 Literary Studies
Historical > FOR Classification > 2102 Curatorial and Related Studies
Keywords women authors, Mary Grant Bruce, Mary Eliza Fulllerton, Marie Elizabeth Josephine Pitt, Marie McKeown, biography, immigrants, Irish diaspora, literature, Australia, Ireland
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