ORCID
0000-0001-8758-1167
Subject Area
Humanities, Language and Literature, General/Other, Language and Literature, English and American
Abstract
In Ecologies of Belief, I argue that literary and folkloric texts of nineteenth-century Ireland draw upon the legendary history of the ancient past to position ongoing experiences within the larger story of Ireland. Furthermore, I contend that this process is organized according to indigenously Irish ecologies that closely intertwine Irish stories, the natural world, and the supernatural beings thought to inhabit it. Irish stories thereby forge a compelling continuity between present and past, but they do so according to models that explicitly foreground cultural rupture and fragmented iterations of Irish identity. This dynamic accounts for the paradoxical nature of nineteenth-century Irish texts, which have been deemed both fragmented and tending toward a grand national narrative.
This dissertation centers on texts produced during the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it also incorporates medieval Irish texts and mid-twentieth-century folklore that shed light on revival processes and dynamics. Methodologically, Ecologies of Belief handles a wide variety of textual materials according to a compositionist approach, outlined by Bruno Latour as a method of composing and crafting meaning through the aggregation of diverse materials. The project is also informed by postcolonial Irish studies, by Indigenous approaches to folk knowledge, and by the geo-political concept of the “pluriverse,” an approach to global knowledge systems that privileges local, ecologically attuned knowledge over a single totalizing force.
Each chapter approaches Irish stories through a different ecological framework. Chapter 1 examines the folklore collection activities of Lady Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats as a reenactment of folklore collection depicted in the late-twelfth-century Acallam na Senórach, each figure renewing pre-established lineages of oral and literate cultural transmission. Chapter 2 uncovers striking resonances between folkloric memories of the Irish Famine (collected one hundred years after the event) and motifs from Ireland’s legendary history. Chapter 3 considers the role of geological layering in Irish folklore and the way two of Bram Stoker’s novels make use of the folkloric richness of Irish soil to complicate depictions of imperial “improvers” disenchanting magical Irish spaces. Chapter 4 considers the phenomenon of Irish Orientalism, Irish Gothic monsters, and folk collectives of “fairies” and “peasants” to explore the way Irish stories transmit ancient cultural knowledge through embodied and disembodied forms capable of preserving life-essence. Ecologies of Belief highlights the immense explanatory power of Irish stories and the model they may provide for more local and ecologically rooted living.
Degree Date
Summer 2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
Advisor
Tim Cassedy
Second Advisor
Greg Brownderville
Third Advisor
Juliet Shields
Fourth Advisor
Renée Fox
Number of Pages
300
Format
Recommended Citation
McClure, Lindsey, "Ecologies of Belief: Structures of Memory, Knowledge, and History in Irish Stories of the Long Nineteenth Century" (2026). English Theses and Dissertations. 24.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_english_etds/24
