Of Ruin and Archaism: Kate O’Brien and the Polemics of Place in 1930s Ireland

Abstract

Kate O’Brien’s 1938 novel Pray for the Wanderer illustrates the polemics of place operating in bourgeois Ireland in 1937, the year of the Irish Constitutional referendum. O’Brien’s subtle and audacious literary technique charts the social and political landscapes of a strongly Catholic Saorstát Eireann (Irish Free State) which emerged during the 1930s. Accordingly Pray for the Wanderer employs a metonymic equivalent of O’Brien’s native Limerick, located in the West of Ireland, to represent a dimension of the Irish postcolonial experience. The theoretical lenses trained upon Pray for the Wanderer which bring the literary geographies of O’Brien’s writing into focus consist primarily of methods which excavate the prose landscape of her text by employing an application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Historical Poetics.