Abstract:
The aim of this article is to examine the internal transformation in the structure of postcolonial thought, and its manifestation in the form of the confrontation between nationalism and anti-colonial individuality in modern Irish novels. This article seeks to introduce the seemingly postcolonial perspective of the Irish government as a mixture of neo-colonial thinking and restrictive systems, and then to investigate the manifestation of this thought in Irish novels. This article aims to critically examine these fundamental changes in characterization and narrative influenced by the confrontation between the neo-colonial state and the anti-colonial nation, with a reading based on the definitions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Theodor Adorno. Therefore, this article examines the novels Black List, Eichmann in My Head by Francis Stewart, The Butcher's Boy by Patrick McCabe as primary texts, and Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce as the main critical infrastructure of modern Irish novels.
Machine summary:
Keywords: Modern Irish Novel, Gilles Deleuze, Francis Stewart, Postcolonial Literature, Neo-Colonial Virtual Reality, James Joyce, Hyper-Joycean Hero Introduction According to David Lloyd, a postcolonial Irish theorist and critic, while the mid-twentieth century witnessed the emergence of individualistic currents and especially a return to self, the 1940s and 1950s can be considered as the peak of social-cultural introspection and its introduction as the main entry point for the formation of modern identity.
This article also aims to reveal the distinctions between radical critical currents of anti-hegemonic thought against neo-colonialism and crystallized in the modern Irish novel, especially Stewart’s modern novel, by using the radical critical perspective of Deleuze and Guattari and relying on Theodor Adorno⁷’s negative dialectical theory, and to introduce them as critics who seek a new and inherently libertarian definition of Irish identity and therefore strive to expose the process of internal colonial discourse.
According to critics such as Ian McBride and Declan Kiberd, the embrace of such radical individualism in literature and its manifestation in creating subversive characters not only led to the replacement of state and neo-colonial historiography with a self-referential and individual-centered history similar to the framework of biography in Ireland, but also directly led to the emergence of modern Irish identity.
For Stewart too, art is a cognitive-executive language that, in line with a Barthesian definition, not only breaks habit and offers a new definition of Irish individual identity but also creates other dimensions of real realities such as the Irish Revolution, the emergence of neo-colonial thought, and ultimately national individualism; realities that even Joyce’s beautiful language refrains from expressing and only presents the artistic perception of the story’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, as a touchstone.
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