Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.”