“Cultura sub asediul vulgului”: versiuni şi revizuiri ale toposului cultural al Conacului anglo-irlandez
“Culture besieged by barbarity”: Versions and Reversions of the Anglo-Irish Big House

Summary/Abstract: A recurrent theme in Anglo-Irish literature is provided by the space of the “Big House”, i.e. the country-houses and estates of the Protestant Ascendancy that bear witness to this group’s social and cultural organisation and are, thus, turned into a marker of cultural identity. As such, the employment of the big house theme is likely to reflect the continuous decline underwent by this class in the course of the political and economic transformations undergone by the Irish society in its pre- and, especially, post-revolutionary decades. Though it is primarily related to the Anglo-Irish novelistic tradition, the paper focuses on the representations of the big house in twentieth-century Irish drama, with an interest in the figuring and re-figuring of this metaphorical space through a corpus of plays among which Lennox Robinson’s The Big House, W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory, Brian Friel’s Aristocrats or Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats offer interesting case studies of the way in which its deployment offers a multi-faceted perspective on issues related to the definition of personal or cultural identity.

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