Troubled FormationsSexuality and the Irish CatholicBildungsroman, 1916-1965

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Summary This dissertation studies the historical development of the Irish Catholic bildungsroman from James Joyce to Edna O ’Brien and John McGahern. Specifically, this study is focused on the construction of sexuality in this genre. The novels are therefore read in conjunction with those d iscourses of sexuality that were circulating in Irish Catholic culture between the First World W a r and the Second Vatican Council. The first chapter reconsiders the concentration on issues of public morality that characterised Irish Catholicism in the early twentieth century, and most acutely in the two decades after independence. In the second chapter, I discuss the epistemic shift in the understanding of modern sexuality that was occasioned by the historical emergence of sexology and psychoanalysis, before moving on to develop a close reading of Joyce’s A Po rtra it o f the A rtis t A s a Young Man (1916). The third chapter contains close readings of two novels by Kate O ’Brien, and locates O ’B

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