MERGING SOCIAL CRITICISM WITH IRISH CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE SHORT STORY COLLECTION THE UNTILLED FIELD BY GEORGE MOORE

Abstract

The paper analyses the short story collection The Untilled Field by the Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) with the aim of establishing the subversive potential of these stories in the context of the criticism of the overpowering dogmas within the Irish society at the beginning of the 20th century. With this long neglected short story collection, George Moore reveals a darker, silenced side of Ireland, hidden from the public discourse of the socio-political mainstream of the period. His social criticism is primarily focused on some neuralgic aspects of the Irish society of the time, namely on the dominant influence of the Irish Catholic church on the collective ethos of the nation and, subsequently, on the spiritual and moral paralysis of the Irish people as well as on mass emigrations of the Irish to America. By pinpointing these, in his view, destructive social forces and the complex sociopolitical situation in Ireland during the formation of the modern Irish state, George Moore identifies a state of collective moral lethargy characterised by total absence of any possibility of individual affirmation through artistic agency. The importance of this short story collection, from the point of view of scientific research, lies in the foregrounding motivation behind it. In other words, in George Moore´s intention to dig deep into the relentless existence of the Irish people at one stage in the country´s history and to re-shape the well- established colonial representations which favoured falsely pastoral visions of Ireland. It was not until the second half of the 20th century that the stigma of ´un-patriotic´ and ´subversive´ was lifted from this short story collection giving it, though still limited, well-deserved attention and recognising its literary and artistic importance for Irish national culture and for its literature.