Impure Thoughts

Impure thoughts explores the relationship between sexuality, literature and Catholicism in twentieth-century Ireland. It offers an innovative history of the Irish Catholic bildungsroman, or novel of formation. In the hands of diverse Irish writers, from James Joyce to Edna O'Brien, this popular genre offered an imaginative space to think about, worry over and negotiate the connection between youth, sexuality and modernity.From Stephen Dedalus onwards, the youthful protagonists of these novels grappled with the challenges of becoming an adult in twentieth-century Ireland, while also symbolising a society confronting the historical challenges of post-colonial development. As Impure thoughts shows, in these novels the plot of self-formation and sexual exploration consistently provided varied and contending imaginative resolutions to the contradictions of capitalism, and the specific shape which these took in post-independence Ireland. But these novels were not the only stories of youth circulating in Irish culture during these decades. Impure thoughts includes an original assessment of varied archival material, most notably Catholic advice pamphlets for teenagers, and it maps out the distinctive forms of sexual discourse - from Catholic moral theology to Freudian psychoanalysis - used in various combinations by the novelists and by the proponents of Catholic sexual morality. The result is a nuanced and provocative reappraisal of how sexuality was regulated and controlled in twentieth-century Ireland. As Ireland grapples with the bitter legacy of the twentieth century, this interdisciplinary study will bring a fresh perspective on some especially fraught, painful and complex problems in contemporary Irish culture and politics.