Suggested Topics

1. Irish storytelling: myths, sagas and motifs.
2. Medieval schools of poetry in Ireland. Religious poetry: monastic schools as promoters of culture; poetic function and status.
3. Trends and themes in the Anglo-Irish novel of the nineteenth century: the regional novel and the big house theme.
4. The portrait of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy in the nineteenth century Anglo-Irish novel.
5. Verisimilitude and mode of narration in  Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Stoker’s Dracula.
6. The vampire theme and tale in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Stoker’s Dracula.
7. The Irish Literary Revival: direction, themes, emblems; defining representatives.
8. The theatre of the Irish Literary Revival.
9. Irish nationalist representations and the non-heroic image of Irish rural life in John Millington Synge: The Playboy of the Western World.
10. W. B. Yeats’ commitment, political poems and the Irish political scene.
11. W. B. Yeats’s vision of life and growing old, his old age poems.
12. W. B. Yeats’s aesthetic and philosophical principles, sense of history and evolution and representation in his poems.
13. J. Joyce’s kind of Ireland.
14. J. Joyce’s protean narrative technique and the use of the interior monologue.
15. J. Joyce’s Dubliners: the theme of paralysis, the representation of Ireland and Dublin.
16. The condition of the artist in Ireland in J. Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
17. J. Joyce’s mythical realism in Ulysses: the Homeric poem and its counterparts and avatars in contemporary Dublin.