ABOUT

Hi! My name is Rebecca Fitzgerald and I am an MA English student at University College Cork. I completed my BA degree in Joint Honours English and History last year, and decided to pursue my interest in English after examining the Modernities course and finding it contained a great many topics that interested me. Thus far, it has exceeded my expectations; the course offers a far deeper understanding to the 1700s-1900s texts I am inclined to favour in terms of philosophy and genre and has encouraged me to adopt a far more attentive stance. Thesis-wise, it offers a great deal of scope and I am actually looking forward to putting my topic together. Rarely have I ever looked forward to an assignment so much!

I hope to have a career in publishing in the future, so over the course of this year the aim is to get as much experience as possible in any field that bears relation to it. During the summer I did voluntary work in a research library and gained valuable experience in IT skills, archive research and preservation of documents. Of course, the eventual goal is to secure an internship in a publishing company, but considering the difficulty in gaining a place, every bit of experience I get in the meantime is of vital importance. Literature has been my core interest from a very young age, and making a career from it would be fantastic.

My interest is primarily in Romantic Literature and its origins/influences. The entire period appeared to be one of enormous cultural upheaval in every form. Art, politics, literature- all were affected in some form or another. Nationalism experienced a surge in prominence, which I am keen to examine in my thesis. Anybody who knows me will testify I am a hardcore Jane Austen fan, and have been since the age of thirteen. But over the course of my English BA, I discovered that during Austen’s lifetime, there were numerous other women novelists that were just as popular, yet escaped similar recognition. So I eagerly researched the novels of these women authors, and found that the manner in which they were simply excluded from the literary canon, particularly in university coursework, was unfathomable. Last year, I completed a seminar essay on Mary Hays, a novelist mocked for the apparent excessive sentiment in her popular novel The Memoirs Of Emma Courtney. Sentimental it was, but what was overlooked completely was her passionate argument for feminine personal expression, which in terms of her narrative style was given far greater emphasis. Modernist studies last year also offered insight into writers into Virginia Woolf, keen to smash the Romantic/Victorian conventions that seemed to consign women writers in to “the novel of manners”. Safe to say, a gender argument will find its way into my thesis in some form or another!

Well, that’s my introduction! To sum up the contents of my forthcoming blogs, it will most probably remain within the confines of literature’s place within arts and culture, but the topics could vary. I am quite nervous as I have never done a personal blog before. Oh well, here it goes!

Rebecca