Fictional representations of Roger Casement

• Grant number: 13/01451-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2013
• End date: July 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra
• Grantee: Mariana Bolfarine
• Supervisor: Luke Gibbons
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth), Ireland
• Associated to the scholarship: 11/18477-2 - Fictional representations of Roger Casement, BP.DR

Abstract

The life of the controversial Irish nationalist Roger David Casement, who was sentenced to death for high treason by the British Crown, has inspired writers to produce works of various literary genres: prose, poetry, drama and critical essays. Our thesis aims at analyzing and questioning how the relationship between history and fiction shape the reconstruction of Roger Casement as a character in literary texts by writers of different places, at different times. We intend to tackle, firstly, the concept of violence towards nature in the science fiction novel The Lost World (1912) that presents and accentuates the heroic facet of Casement, and in the radio play Cries from Casement to his Bones are Brought to Dublin (1973), chiefly about how an imperialist could become a fierce nationalist. Secondly, we deal with works that reveal violence towards the subject in terms of the release of Casement's repressed sexuality in the novels The Knight of the Flaming Heart (1995), The Dream of the Celt (2010) and in the radio play The Dreaming of Roger Casement (2012). Our initial hypothesis is that temporality is directly related to the fictional representation of Casement, in the sense that the more recent the work is written, the more the character is construed in a way that his homosexuality is emphasized and on the other, the older it is, the closer it gets to a heroic representation within a humanitarian nationalist context. (AU)