Cassandra S. Tully de Lope, "Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers" (Routledge, 2024)

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Cassandra S. Tully de Lope, "Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers" (Routledge, 2024)
Host: Helen Panett
Guest: Dr. Cassandra S. Tully de Lope
Date: October 14, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers around Dr. Cassandra S. Tully de Lope’s book, Masculinity and Identity in Irish Literature: Heroes, Lads, and Fathers (Routledge, 2024). Dr. Tully de Lope discusses how concepts of masculinity and identity have been explored in 20th and 21st-century Irish novels, employing a distinctive interdisciplinary methodology combining corpus linguistics and literary analysis. The discussion covers Irish cultural models of masculinity, particularly the legacy of mythical figures like Cuchulainn, the dynamic interplay of father-son relationships, the rise and fall of the "lad" figure, and how contemporary literature increasingly represents marginalized masculinities.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Dr. Tully de Lope’s Academic Journey

[03:07]

• Irish-Spanish heritage—her father was Irish, instilling a lifelong fascination with Irish culture and literature.
• Initial engagement with masculinity studies came from analyzing literary characters like Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, and Dorian Gray in her undergraduate work.
• Shifted towards corpus linguistics during her MA, mentored by Carolina Amador, focusing on masculinity within Irish literature.
• Developed an interdisciplinary approach blending traditional literary analysis with quantitative corpus studies.

“From then on, it was bye bye to any other type of investigation research. I just loved masculinity.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [03:52]

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The Cuchulainn Model: Impossible Irish Masculinity

[06:14]

• Cuchulainn represents the ultimate, unattainable ideal of Irish masculinity: self-sacrificing warrior-hero, embodying the "male gaze."
• Such ideals, recurrent across different cultures (parallels drawn to Spain’s El Cid), render "ordinary" men set up for inevitable failure given their unrealistic standards.
• The novels in Dr. Tully de Lope’s corpus demonstrate repeated male attempts—and failure—to live up to this model.

“Kuchulainn in this case also sets up men for failure...because it's not realistic. You cannot portray a warrior, but also the male breadwinner of the house and have a healthy mental state with this.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [06:45]

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Corpus Linguistics: Advantages and Challenges

[08:17]

• Corpus linguistics enables the systematic quantification of phenomena across multiple texts—tracking, for example, how often characters fight, use specific types of speech, or exchange nicknames/insults.
• The combination of close reading and computational tools captures linguistic recurrences invisible to the “naked eye.”
• Emphasizes the balance needed between computer analysis and human interpretation for meaningful insights.

“It's humanly impossible to do it with your human eye... But with a computer, that's a good thing. Like nothing gets lost.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [09:18]

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Models of Irish Masculinity

[11:30]
Breakdown of primary models:

• Heroes and Soldiers:
  The Cuchulainn/warrior ideal—chivalric, disciplinarian, associated with honor—yet increasingly obsolete.
• Lads:
  Emerges from 1990s Celtic Tiger culture; young men defined by physicality, socializing, sexual conquests, and sport. Ultimately also collapses post-economic crash.
• Fathers:
  The silent, disciplinarian father: both familial head and nation-symbol; involved in generational conflict with sons, shifting with modernity and feminism.
• Sons:
  Frequently in conflict with fathers, questioning tradition, repeating generational cycles of rebellion and reevaluation.
• Racialized and Homosexual Masculinities:
  More visible in 21st-century literature—their identities doubly questioned due to not aligning with hero or lad models.

“The son is going to try and come up and fight the father... it’s a natural progression of things in the life of a family.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [13:56]

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Methodology: Corpus Linguistics Meets Literary Analysis

[19:30]

• Built a corpus of 18 novels by Irish male authors (1965–2018).
• Mixed corpus linguistics (analyzing frequency and context of words like names, insults, terms of endearment) with corpus stylistics (combining linguistic patterns with literary context).
• Emphasized authenticity, representativeness, and strategic sampling in selecting texts.

“What I like about mixing discipline, is you can guess a little bit of everything... you can get something grand out of it.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [21:44]

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Selecting the Corpus

[23:16]

• Extensive groundwork; spent a summer in Dublin reading and consulting with bookstore staff and academics.
• Selected novels authentic to Irish experience, resonant with her own Irish family.
• Expanded the corpus after her PhD to include more diverse masculinities (e.g., racialized, homosexual).

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Alternative Character Categories

[28:50]

1. Characters Against the World:
   Non-conforming individuals (e.g., Patrick Moran in That They May Face the Rising Sun) retreating from masculine norms.
2. Characters Against Each Other:
   Interpersonal, often generational, conflicts drive narratives (e.g., fathers and sons in John McGahern’s The Dark).

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Core Findings from the Corpus Study

Male Vocatives and Hierarchies

[34:09]

• Shift in naming (e.g., “Daddy” when affectionate, “Father” when angry) signals relationship dynamics and emotional context.
• Nicknames may serve as terms of endearment or as subtle insults, mirroring real-world male banter and hierarchy-building.
• The same phenomena found in other cultures (not just Irish or English).

“I found also the nicknames can be used as insults too...So for instance, in the Journey Home… Francis, the protagonist, would be called Frank at home, but we Francie as an insult, etc.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [35:08]

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Verbs of Speech and Domination

[38:07]

• Analyzed speech verbs (“shout,” “demand,” “accept,” “admit”) to track dominance/submission in male interactions.
• Around 10–11% of these verbs reflected some form of domination or compliance, signposting power struggles.
• Narration and adverbial modification (e.g., “demanded angrily”) double-down on hierarchical meaning.
• Sometimes, domination in speech can mask underlying vulnerability.

“Domination with verbs like shout or scream...they use their shouted words to imply domination when in fact they were just losing the battle...” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [39:38]

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Body Language, Hypermasculinity, and Shifts

[42:21]

• Male characters often perform physical dominance ("manspreading," puffing up) even when feeling insecure, as a learned hypermasculine script.
• Hypermasculinity is performative—a mask for emotional vulnerability, often acknowledged in narration.
• Over time, subtle shifts: Modern novels show increased platonic physical affection (patting on the back, shoulder touches), yet full emotional intimacy is rare and usually awkward, indicating persistent social taboos.

“Hyper masculinity is a show of strength when they don’t feel it at all, not at least in these novels.” — Cassandra S. Tully de Lope [44:13]

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Literary and Cultural Shifts

• Across the studied period, there’s a visible transition from rigid, traditional models toward more nuanced, pluralistic representations of masculinity—including increased visibility for homosexual men and racialized identities.
• Male-male intimacy is rendered in tentative, coded gestures rather than direct emotional expression; societal attitudes remain a limiting force.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “I’ve always been interested in Irish culture... I became interested in masculinities through, I think, Rod of a Carbon Male characters in literature, Mr. Darcy.” — Tully de Lope [03:15]
• “Kuchulainn in this case also sets up men for failure...because it's not realistic.” — Tully de Lope [06:45]
• “What I most like about corpus linguistics... when you look at a bigger number of books...you can actually see the importance of it.” — Tully de Lope [09:00]
• “Nicknames can be used as insults too...they are meant to be said as, oh, I love you.” — Tully de Lope [36:00]
• “Sometimes they would use their shouted words to imply domination when in fact they were just losing the battle...” — Tully de Lope [39:38]
• “Hypermasculinity is a show of strength when they don’t feel it at all...they are acting this way. But in fact all of us would be scared in a fight.” — Tully de Lope [44:13]
• “I still think, and I'm still interested and trolled by the idea that how the female gaze works for male characters.” — Tully de Lope [46:40]
• “Hosier is now one of these representations of Irish identity with this mythological background and this mythologized identity of what Irish should be like, I don't know. But of course it's not, because it's just an outside of Ireland idea.” — Tully de Lope [51:13]

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Future Research Directions

[46:40]

• Creating a corpus analyzing women writers’ portrayals of men—contrast with male authors’ approach.
• Further nuanced studies on marginalized masculinities (racialized, homosexual).
• Current pilot project (with David Sotoka Fernandez): Investigating apology patterns—do homosexual male characters apologize more than non-homosexual? Initial findings suggest so.
• Exploration of how myth and popular culture (e.g., Hosier as a “bog king”) shape contemporary Irish identity and masculinity.

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Memorable Moments

• Dr. Tully de Lope’s playful tone and frequent self-deprecation about her technical skills with corpus linguistics.
• Recurrent mentions of familial resonance—how her father and family shaped her literary interests and the felt authenticity of the corpus.
• The international angle: comparing findings with Spanish naming/insulting conventions and discussing Irish literature’s wider cultural reach.
• Lively anticipation for future projects—especially the idea of mapping mythologized contemporary Irish figures and tracking generational change through literature and pop culture.

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Summary

This conversation is a deep dive into the evolving representations and performances of masculinity in late 20th- and early 21st-century Irish literature. Dr. Cassandra S. Tully de Lope’s approach not only bridges linguistic and literary studies but also personal heritage and broader societal shifts, offering an innovative framework for future research. The episode is both rich in academic insight and grounded in warmth and humor, making it highly accessible and thought-provoking for listeners interested in Irish studies, gender, or the intersections of language and identity.

Transcript

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[Marshall Po]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome the New Books Network.

[Helen Panett]

Good morning and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. My name is Helen Panett and I'm one of the co hosts of the channel. Today, I'm delighted to be talking to Cassandra S. Tolidalope, who is currently researching while working as a civil servant teaching in an educational center for adults in Extremadura in Spain. Formerly, she worked as an associate lecturer in the University of Extremadura, where she received her PhD with cum laude distinction in Contemporary Irish Literature and masculinity in 2022. Her most recent book is Masculinity and Identity in Irish Heroes, Lads and Fathers, which was originally launched in 2024 and just recently relaunched in July 2025 with Routledge in their Studies in Irish Literature series. Cassandra, thank you so much for joining me today. I wonder if you'd begin the interview just by saying a few words about yourself and how you became interested in this topic and what led to it becoming a book.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Thank you so much, Helen, for having me. I'm truly honored to be here. So my dad was Irish, and he came to Spain in the 60s, more or less. He traveled a bit until he settled down in my hometown. And I've always been interested in Irish culture, Irish literature, et cetera. But funnily enough, I became interested in masculinities through, I think, Rod of a Carbon Male characters in literature, Mr. Darcy. And when I was doing my undergraduates in the University of Seville, my director of my dissertation over there, she was like, why, instead of doing Lisi Dennis, like, it's, it's done before, why don't you do Mr. Darcy and analyze Mr. Darcy literature? So I come from a literature background, actually. And I said, okay, well, that's fine. And then I picked Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, and Dorian Gray. And I compare them, like different traits of toxic masculinity and fragile masculinity and stuff. And from then on, it was bye bye to any other type of investigation research. I just loved masculinity. And when I came back to my hometown to study my M.A. i. It was serendipitous, really important, because I met Carolina Amador and she's a specialized researcher in Irish letters and Irish immigration and stuff. And it's funny because her husband is Irish too. And we met in a couple of Irish events, stuff that we have here in Cathedral. And I told her I wanted to do something with her, and she's like, okay, do you work with Corpus linguistic? I was like, what's that? No idea. Zero idea. So we talked about what I could do for my MA thesis, and then I decided to do masculinity generics literature through corpus linguistics. So I moved on a little bit to an interdisciplinary background and the rest is history. I just did my PhD with her, and I'm very grateful because she is just Grant. We. We are in Contacts monthly and we keep talking about things and stuff. Yeah, she's just. Granted, that's.

[Helen Panett]

That's so interesting that just. I guess I assumed because the book is so grounded in corpus linguistics, I sort of assumed that that had come first. That's. That's so interesting. That also explains a lot of the references to Hiberno English, isn't it? Because your thesis director would be a real expert in that area. So, so interesting. So from Mr. Darcy to Corpus linguistics leading you to this book. That's. That's a great insight. So getting into the book itself, in your introduction, you identify Cuchulainn as a significant model for Irish masculinity. And in fact, Cuchulainn is a model which sets men up for failure. I know you'll come back to Cuchulainn later in the book. So could you very briefly tell us a little bit about the masculine ideal that is represented by Cuchulainn?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Right. So Cuchulain in Ireland represents the male gaze, I would say. And this has been studied before with other characters. So if you ask a man, who do they prefer, Thor or Loki from the Marvel series, they will always, 90% they will say Thor. But if you ask women, they will say Loki. Because that's a female gaze. No, it's different. So Cuculad is the creation of men for men to try and be the warrior, the strong figure of the house, and the self sacrifice in a country now that is being occupied and stuff. And we have that image across cultures because in Spain, we have El Cid, Campeador, or Pelayo in the north of Spain, et cetera. So it's quite a common ideal for men to look up to. But Khulan in this case also sets up men for failure, as you said before, because it's not realistic. You cannot portray a warrior, but also the male breadwinner of the house and have a healthy mental state with this. So most of the men in the novels that I picked for my corpus and my studies, they try somehow to become a strong figure, and they fail miserably because it's impossible. You cannot do this.

[Helen Panett]

Exactly. We'll probably come back to Cuchullen a little bit later on. But as you said, you set out to study how novels written by Irish authors in the 20th and early 21st century explore this inevitable failure of living up to this masculine ideal. And you do this, as you mentioned earlier, through language and specifically through corpus studies, which, and you mentioned this word earlier, makes your book so interesting from an interdisciplinary perspective. What do you think are the advantages of studying literary text through this lens?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

What I most like about corporate linguistics, because at first I'm very literally voce researcher. So when I started doing copworld linguistics, I Just had complaints and complaints like, I cannot do anything with this and I have to learn how to use the properly a computer to use that. So. So if you're not computer, you know, if you're not very tech savvy at the beginning, it can be a bit daunting. But to be honest, it felt with the guidance of the right people, Carolina, et cetera, I was able to focus on a text looking at numbers. So how many times does this thing happen in the text? Not how many times does this character fight in the text? And it's telling if you compare it with other books, how many times do character fights or how many times do male characters insult or male characters, or how many times, et cetera. And also it's from a very outsider point of view, it looks very mathematical. And if you are not interested in maths, it can be useless, to be honest, like, why do I care about this? But when you look at a bigger number of books and a corpora that it's bigger, et cetera, no corpus, that is biggest story, you can actually see the importance of it. Because I have read all my books, of course, like all the books that I have in my corpus, and I have done it by hand and through a computer to see how all these things happen, or how many times they fight, how many times they insult each other, how many times they use nicknames, et cetera. And it's humanly impossible to do it just with one with, you know, with your human eye you cannot see all the examples. Some of them might get lost in the research. But with a computer, that's a good thing. Like nothing gets lost. You have to see all of the instances, you have to see all the numbers, and then you can reach conclusions. And the other way around is very interesting as well, because sometimes, of course, you need the human eye to differentiate some examples and to see. Okay, no, this is not an insult, it's actually bantering, et cetera. And also you can do that with a computer. So the mix of both of them, I think you can gain new things, new perspectives.

[Helen Panett]

I mean, for sure, but I mean, there is no way you would have picked up on, as you say, those recurring phenomena.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

No way.

[Helen Panett]

Without the use of a computer. But then obviously the computer has its limitations, which is come back with your analysis. It's very fruitful. People who read the book will find out. So using that methodology, you describe different models of masculinity which are in fact the subtitle of the book, which are Heroes, Lads and Fathers. So could you very briefly outline these different models and then also maybe mention the two other sort of side models that you referred to in chapter two.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

So funnily enough, I wanted the title of the book to be Heroes Fathers. Very catchy title. I was very commercially minded and ruthless. Says, no, let's go for a more academic point of view and then we'll do the marketing thing. I was like, okay, so first we talk about heroes and soldiers. And here is where Kohulan comes back and this idea of the warrior values, not very honor driven, disciplinarian, also a little bit of medieval values, not very chivalric kind of male characters that try to save the day and save the family and the damsel in the stress, et cetera. But that was created especially the 20th century now with the rice vegeta. But it's meant to disappear because you cannot keep it up. So that's where the other models of masculinity come back. And I look also at Latz, which is a very specific masculinity from the 90s in Ireland. The Celtic tired, all these young men, well, not always young, but mostly from the 80 when they are 18, towards their 30s or 40s, and how they just want to party and they enjoy the economic boom and they go to Ibiza, they just want, you know, they are very sexually driven and their, their conquests are the best, etc. And they're also very driven by the rising of the athletics associations like the gaa, et cetera, bodily, you know, the body movement to be strong and physically big, etc. Which is also a model that it's going to fail and disappear because of the crash, the economic crash. And this is also, this is very common in Donald Ryan's books and I think I explore that a little bit in my book as well. And then we also have the model of the father, which is the, you know, how there is this concept of the Irish mummy, which is still common talked about, it's very, very talked about nowadays in Irish podcasts and appears a lot on TikTok, et cetera. And no one talks about the Irish father, but he is also a very strong figure in the house. And I remember my dad talking about his Irish dust and the harvesting of August, how it was very stressing time for the father because he had to take care of the land, et cetera. And also the father as not only the caretaker of the family, but of the land, noting take care of the house and the, you know, the agriculture of this country, very important. But also we have that it's A failed model, not only because of Ireland as the father nation, but because culture changes. So the son is going to try and come up and fight the father. We have a culture where feminism is rising so women want to work and get out of the house. We have, you know, all these different changes that the Irish father is not going to like. He just wants to be in control. He's also the disciplinarian. He's the one who is very strict about it. And then we have the son, the other counterparts of the father in the, in the, in his own house. Now he's going to have his enemy, as it were, and he's going to rebel against the father. He's going to go out and he's going to say at the beginning, no, their, their relationship is going to be confrontational most of the time because he's going to think, and I think this is common for every child. No, they're going to say, my father doesn't know anything. They are very old minded, old fashioned. And then you go out, you work, you become a parent yourself and then you say, maybe my father was not that wrong. So I think it's a natural progression of things in the life of a family. And here in Ireland is very common for father and sons. I believe it might be common for mother and daughter too, but I have not studied that. I focus on fathers and sons also. The stages of childhood know that come through with the rites of passages and stuff. I talk a little bit about that too in my book because it's something that. It's very interesting. Every culture has their own rites of passages and they are different, but Irish ones, the drinking of alcohol or the pint of Guinness stuff, it's something that, it was very ingrained in my family as well, growing up, to be honest. And finally, the other models of masculinity that I talk about are those of racialized men and homosexual men too. Because of course, with the advent of the 21st century, we have the decriminalization of homosexuality, et cetera, in Ireland. So it's very common to find. It's not very common, but it's common to start finding some literature about these kinds of masculinities. So when I was doing my PhD, I didn't want to have a lot of books inside my corpus because it was going to be very big. But when I got the chance to write the book, I decided to add more books and I added ones with rationalized men and homosexual men as well, so I could study that more in depth and how Their identity is not only questioned because maybe they are foreign, but also because they are homosexual and they do not conform to the lads or the Kukulan ideal of masculinity. So yeah, I studied all of those.

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[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

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[Marshall Po]

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[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

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[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

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[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Okay. Right. So as I said before, I'm not an expert in any of this, to be honest, because I mixed everything and I learned a little bit of everything, and I put it together and it worked.

[Helen Panett]

It did.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Yeah.

[Helen Panett]

It comes across like an expert reading.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Yeah. So I mix corpus linguistics, which is the more linguistic aspect of studying corporate corpora. So the, the verbs, the adverbs, the, the, the pronouns, et cetera. All of that I studied in detail through corpus linguistics. No. So that is the very computer like advanced knowledge of using computer like language as well and using an online program to put all my novels through, etc. And that is the basis. So once you have a basic knowledge of that and you don't have to go into lots of detail, you can go and jump to other type of corporate studies. And that's when I've discovered, well, I discovered it existed already, but I just suddenly this existed. I was like, oh, come on, this is what I want to do. And it was corpus stella, which is the mix of linguistics and literature through corpus. And it helps you more with the. In text analysis. So you can find that instead of just looking at random numbers of verbs or adverbs, et cetera, you can actually look as a full sentence and get the structure out and compare it with other books. This is where, for instance, body language I'll talk about a bit later on. It's very interesting to look at. Of course, it's not just how many times hand appears in a text, but how many times the action of holding hands appears and what does it mean in each of these texts. So you can see the wider context of all the instances that corpus linguistics gives you. So if it gives you 75 times that the verb shout appears, Corpus stylistics adds a little bit more and says, okay, but who shouts in what context, what situation? And what's the end goal of shouting in this conversation? So that's what I like about mixing discipline, because you can guess a little bit of everything, to be honest, and a mix. But when used in little bits, you can get something grand out of it. Like, I didn't have to go into depth, into high, into numbers, because I could do both in context and out of context analysis.

[Helen Panett]

Absolutely. I mean, and that comes across obviously in the results, which is what sort of makes up the. The second sort of half, I suppose, of the book. It is obviously really, really fruitful as a methodology. So we've mentioned it a couple of times. Your corpus is a corpus of 18 Novels written by male Irish authors from the Republic of Ireland and written between 1965 and 2018. So it's quite specific and excludes quite a lot. Quite a lot. Could you tell us a little bit how the selection was made? And you also explain in quite a lot of detail the sort of principles that you need to follow, which are authenticity, representativeness and sampling. So how did this corpus come about?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Right, so when I started my PhD, I spent a whole summer, summer in Ireland and I was working with Jovin Mini, the professor from ucd. And she was. She was saying, okay, so it's your first year. You need to find your PhD voice. Just go out and read. And I was feeling my aesthetic moment of just being from cafe to cafe in Dublin, from bookshop to bookshelf, and just browsing through all the bookshelves. And I remember spending a lot of time in the bookstore chapters, and I think it's Parnell Street. And I kept asking the people working there, it's like, okay, I'm trying to do this, and I have this idea. And they kept saying, like, I don't know what to tell you. Like, there are lots of Irish authors. I was like, okay. So I first started reading everything, like, from the classics to. And not only male writers, but also female writers. Like, I read a lot of Edna o', Brien, who I loved, Love, love, loved. I read a lot of Patrick McCabe, a lot. I don't know. I read a lot of everything. And then I decided, okay, I cannot do a corpus of a hundred books. I mean, I could, but there was going. The. The action of going for specific parts in the text. It's going to get lost with all those many words, et cetera. So I had to narrow it down. So I decided to focus on some offers that I really enjoyed and I really taught. They were going to show they were going to be authentic. No. As one of the aspects of a Corpus. So John McGahern was directly a. Yes, because, wow, I love this. And I saw my family very representative in this. Like the immigration. The father of the house. Yeah, all of it. Although. And one of the books. Amongst women. No, it's mostly women in the house. And we are mostly women in the house. And I felt like my daddy was like, this is out of it. Like, the one that really resonates with me. I remember guessing all the books from Paul Murray, too. And he was lovely when I tried to talk to him because, you know, you have to get a little bit of the copyright and permissions to use them, et cetera. And Paul Mari was amazing talking to him. Dermot Bolger was fantastic to talk to. So it was a very interesting year of just reading and, like, getting to know the books, getting to know the characters. And so they were authentic because they were not very representative of the Irish culture. No, they were not. For instance, John Boyne, Irish author, but writing about other parts of Ireland, etc. And some of his books. So I wanted to be very Irish in reading. And my dad read some of the books as well, and he's like, oh, yeah, this resonates with me too. Like, this is my daddy. Like, I could hear it too. So it's generational coming true. Like all of the books that I tried to pick, and I fell in love easily with most of them. And for instance, the Dead School as well, by Patrick McCabe. My dad is a teacher. I'm a teacher. So I don't know. I know I could have picked other books and other books that, you know, there are many, many, many books to pick from. But these books, they resonated in this terms of characters and character development and how there usually is an older character and a younger one, so there is confrontation and struggles. And then when I finished my PhD and I wanted to add a couple of more books to add more representation and, you know, samples. I could get more samples of homosexuality, for example, or immigration. I got also Kid Witch Ways, the long falling, etc. I got also some more books by Donald Ryan as well, from the. From Law and Aqua Sea as well, because you have Farouk there as an immigrant. So I try to get, you know, it's a work in progress because I can still keep adding books. I don't think I would add more books to this one, but I would create mini corporate corpus out of this one, for instance. Like one with female writers writing about male characters, for instance. So it's something that I could keep coming back to. And I love that. Like, I love that I can keep. I have the base, you know, the main corpus, and I can keep coming back to it with more ideas. Aha. You've got.

[Helen Panett]

You've got, like, the scaffolding, and now you can build lots of different buildings with it. Absolutely. And I think, obviously the end of your book discusses sort of future projects. We'll come back to that. But you've already given us a couple of ideas. So you also say in the book about your selection of novels that one of the thing she wanted to do was to find a number of male characters that conform to a model that was not the norm. Not a hero, not a lad, not a father. So this led you to finding two different categories of characters. Could you tell us about those two categories? Maybe give us an example?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

So I have characters against the world that is, you know, this typical angsty character that hates everybody and everything. And sometimes they are in their teenage years, but not all the time like they. They are still fighting in their early 40s, 50s, and 60s. Like they are not conforming to the societal norm of being the breadwinner of the house. No, they just want to keep traveling or they want to keep living their life about. No. So, for instance, in this case, we have Patrick Moran from that they may face the rising sun in John McGahern's novel. And he left London, he came back to the village, and he's just quietly living in his village, in his farmland, but he is being constantly pushed to be a model of masculinity, Irish masculinity that he might not always like. So he is pushed around in his own village to try and conform to a societal norm, but he just doesn't want to. Like he left London, he doesn't want to be anything but a quiet farmer with his wife, enjoying life, etc. And it's the same with other characters. So teenage characters like Shane o', Driscoll, et cetera, or Hanno or Francis from the Journey Home in Delmo Porger's novels, they are also trying to fight against society and to sometimes get away from their own neighborhoods, their own cities, and find something else out there. But society keeps pushing them. They keep making them a lash or a soldier or a hero or a villain, et cetera. So they keep trying to go backwards. And then the other type of characters is those against each other. So, for example, fathers and sons, Mahoney and the nameless son he has in the dark by John McGovern. They are constantly at each other's throats, like they just want to fight. It's usually the young versus the old character, like the teacher, the headmaster of the school, and the young teacher, Malachi. Malachi in the Dead school by Patrick McCabe. And they are always trying to best each other. One the headmaster has experienced because of all his years, but he's also fashioned in teaching. And then you have the young one who wants to be friends with the students, and it doesn't work, but they love him nonetheless. So, you know, it's a constant fight. And the struggle in the novel sometimes works very well with two characters fighting against each other. But other times, just seeing a character try to get out of town, trying to get out of his family, trying to get out of the noise that surrounds society, it's compelling to them and it's compelling for the reader to be able to see this. Yeah.

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[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

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[Helen Panett]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Excellent. So you, you then, then through the next section of the book, I'm kind of going to just scoot through because it's a really, really fascinating account of the possibilities of using corpus stylistics. I'm interested in us getting to the results which you present in three different chapters. So firstly, you talk about male vocatives and male hierarchy. You look at proper names and nicknames and variations on da, father, dad, et cetera, insults, which you mentioned earlier as well, and terms of endearment. So what would you say are the most interesting findings in this chapter based on your, your, your study of those elements?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

I love doing this part because when I was there was. This was in the proper pandemic when I was starting doing that. And, you know, throughout the morning I would work and throughout the evening my husband and I would just, you know, watch telly or Netflix or whatever. And I remember just before I started doing this, I remember watching telly and watching TV shows and stuff, and I was like, huh, that's interesting, because this character is calling that character this form. And then when this situation changes, he's no longer that name. He's this other name. So I even saw on telly how it works between male characters, how they change names or nicknames. And I said I could look that in my corpus. And I started looking at first nicknames. No, because the action of giving names, for me, it's very interesting. All the action of giving someone a nickname or calling someone lovely instead of, I don't know, whatever else. The opposite. Yeah. I didn't want to curse. So that's exactly that. And I started looking at it and very interestingly, family members, they call each other different names in different situations. So if you want something from your father, you might say, daddy, please give you that. No, but if you're, you know, enraged with them, you may say, father, do this. No, don't do that. No. So it's the same father to children, etc. And I love it because I found also the nicknames can be used as insults too. So for instance, in the Journey Home by Denmark Bolger, they used these a lot. So for instance, Francis, the protagonist, would be called Frank at home, but we Francie as an insult, etc, and also they would use this a lot. And for insults it was hilarious because you could. This happens in Spanish too. I don't know if it happens in. I mean, I'm pretty sure it happens everywhere else. But when you are talking to your friend, you use banter. So in Skippy Dice, I call Mari, they might use insults, but lovingly to each other, like, oh, you are such a bullhead. Whatever not. But they are. They are meant to be said as, oh, I love you. And then we, when they are fighting and they are properly using insults, they are lovely. They say, you think so, eh, you gentlemen? So, yeah, so that happens in Spain as well, which is hilarious because I saw it, I was like, oh, I thought this never happened before. So it's interesting to see how the jokes, the terms, the vocatives, how they change names, works really well. And you might have not noticed this when you read a book. Normally, no, but when you see all of them lined up, I was like, oh, there's something here. I can see something happening here. And I keep seeing it. It's one of those things that my brain keeps looking at films or telly or read another books or whatever. And I was like that it is another book a.

[Helen Panett]

Tuned into it. There's a real international dimension. Then obviously you could take that study and way beyond the Irish texts that you look at, that would be really, really interesting. I'm sorry I interrupted you. Had you finished on that? Thank you. So you then move on to adverbs and verbs of speech, which actually you mentioned earlier when you used, you gave the example of shout. And in particular you look at how those verbs of speech and the adverbs they're associated with can be used to imply domination. Can you give us maybe a couple of examples or just tell us how you interpreted what you came across?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

So because this type of work had been done before. So, for instance, one of my colleagues at university, Pablo Ruano, studied verbs of speech in Dickens novels. So I got the idea from Lush, and I said, okay, let's try and. Because I started with this, and then I moved on to vocative, etc. And of course, you move through it, through the corpus. Like, okay, I got all these findings. How do I order them? And I started with the verbs of speech, and I said, okay, this works here in this corpus too. And I found that because when you divide the verbs of speech, which has been done before, I mean, it has been done by Austin already in 1965. So it's been done before. But there was never a dominance aspect to this because there was never gender involved in the text in the analysis. So I said, okay, so these are mostly men talking to other men. How do they imply dominance through speech? And I discovered that there are two ways, not either from what they say or what the narrator or the writer wants to imply with what is being said. So I analyzed the verbs of speech, and I saw that in all the. Because I looked at different pronouns, because not all the novels were written in third person. So I looked at I, you, he, and proper names. So when I looked at all these different pronouns and with the verbs that accompany them, I saw that domination with verbs like shout or scream, or not verbs with compliance as well, which includes domination because you are complying to the other person, like accept, admit, et cetera. They are around 10 or 11% in the corpus. So they were quite high in comparison with other types of verbs. So that's what gave me the idea to keep going forward. And I kept looking as he let's see, I have an example here. So he. Moran demanded. So demand. And then I said, okay, but there is something else coming after. Moran demanded angrily. And I said, oh, the adverbs are coming into play too. And that's when I looked at adverbs too. And I saw that it's not only the domination that appears in the verb, but also the adverb. So it's aggressively or angrily or exhaustively or insistently. So it's double dominance happening in a lot of these characters, and especially characters, that they would not always feel strong. So sometimes they would use verbs and they would use their shouted words to imply domination when in fact they were just losing the battle against the other person. So it was just like a last call, like, okay, I need to shout to make myself hurt, but it's not working, and that happens. And it's interesting to see. Because when I started to see. Because when I. I looked at the verbs and the adverbs, I was like, oh, no, this. All my work is crumbling down because they are so tinned, but in fact they are not being strong. And then you see the body language verse, which I'll come later too. And it's like, oh, oh, it's working. So you can see that it's all around. This analysis that I tried to. Has to see all these nuances in speech, not only what they say, but also how they say it, how the narrator wants the reader to see, how they are saying it, how it's seen in a conversation, and how their body language is also analyzed.

[Helen Panett]

Absolutely. So that's a nice segue to move on to body language, which is the final of those three chapters, and how the characters in the different novels are described as moving. Moving different body parts. You used the example of the hand earlier. The title of the chapter is Body Language, Hypermasculinity and Other Modes of Masculinity. What did you find about body language in your corpus in relation to this notion of hypermasculinity?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

So usually when we talk about hypermasculinity and body language in your mind, you see this image of a man in the subway occupying three roads of seed with his body. Like he's. What's it called, anyways? Manspreading. There you go, babe. So you find them manspreading. So it's funny because in the novels they do the same. And I don't know, this is something that I wanted to look at because I don't know if it's consciously done by male Irish writers or male writers in general. They describe the men trying to get bigger and puffier and, you know, occupy the most space possible to intimidate the other person when there is a confrontation. But I found that in the novels as well. And when I. And when I saw that the verbs were not working as I wanted them to work, I was not going to change the results. Obviously, that's what I had. And those were results in themselves. Yeah. But when I saw the body working and how hyper masculinity was still being portrayed as, you know, occupying this bigger space and trying to make themselves nastier by, you know, moving aggressively, sometimes I was really shocked as I was like, okay, but he's still not feeling that way. Like he's acting out that way. And then there would be a sentence from the narrator saying, but inside he was shaken. So it works like, okay, they are act saying these things. They are Acting this way. But in fact all of us would be scared in a fight unless it was a third, I mean, first person narrator where you don't see the other party being scared or losing. But in general, hyper masculinity is a show of strength when they don't feel it at all, not at least in these novels. So it was very interesting to see. And it was also very interesting to see how there is a subtle change through the. More Novel. Novel. Novel. Moderns. New modern. Modern novels. Yeah, yeah, novel novels. The modern novels in which men started to touch each other a little bit more. So they wanted to show companionship, but they don't want to appear as homosexuals because this is a fear that appears in the novels as well. So instead of giving each other a warm hug, they might just pat each other on the back, touch the elbow and the shoulder and that's it. Not so the neutral parts of the body that are not purposely mistaken for advances in romantically advances, advances, they might just be considered companionship movements. And that happens in some novels. And it's very interesting to see because some characters that you're taught were a show of very aggressive, et cetera, very manly, very hyper masculine. Sometimes they have these little movements in which they show their true selves and they want to be touched, they want to be hugged, they want to be treated like a normal person. But because there is this hyper masculine barrier, they cannot give each other hugs, not yet at least. Or if they do, it's this very awkward hug in which they hug each other and they pass in the back very strongly and it's a very quick hug, they separate really fast and they're like, okay, and that's it. No homosexuals here. It's like you can give each other a hug, like no one is judging.

[Helen Panett]

It's interesting that for the sort of span of years that the novel's cover allowed you to really sort of identify those shapes, shifts in relation to that. That's so interesting. And that's what brings to a conclusion your sort of analytical section of the book. And then in your conclusion you talk about possible future directions for you or for anyone who takes example from your book could take this research. What do you think the most interesting possible future directions to take this research?

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

So I still think, and I'm still interested and trolled by the idea that how the female gaze works for male characters. And I would love, love, love to see how female writers write about men because it's very. I'm pretty sure it's a very different point of view, like men writing men versus women writing men or men writing about women. No, it's a very different idea that we could find. So it would be very interesting to have a corpus about it and see novels from more or less the same period or maybe get a decade and try to find that. Also, I mean I would love to go into more in depth about different masculinities like racialized masculinities or homosexual masculinities, etc. And I actually have a. Well, probably I'm jumping onto the last question, but one of my colleagues and friends, David Sotoka Fernandez and I, we are working on a pilot project about how because he works with I would say apologies and what's it called? It doesn't come to mind right now. But like we work with apologies in text and how our theory is that homosexual characters apologize more than non homosexual characters. So it's a pilot project that we have that we currently have in which we see how different characters. So we are looking now as Jamie o' Neil as him to voice and it works like the male characters that are homosexual, they apologize more than the other male characters of the novel. So it's something that we can keep looking at and it's very interesting to see.

[Helen Panett]

That is so interesting. That's probably quite gendered as well, isn't it? With female characters, polygen or the male characters as well. And is that just on a corpus of Irish texts or just working on the atone two boys text for the moment.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

From the moment it's two boys, but we would love to make a bigger corpus. So if you're an Irish writer who has, I don't know, books with homosexual characters and want to send them my way because I'm actually. We are actually looking at more novels to add to and we have a couple more but for now we're just looking at this one like it's a pilot study we're working on.

[Helen Panett]

Sure, sure, sure. And is that going to lead to a publication even just like an article about. Fantastic. So. Or maybe not a book. Book length study or.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Well, we don't know for sure because we want to get some funds for the projects as well and we have a paper written already on it on the pilot project. So we want to keep going at it, keep adding at it. But he's just finishing his Ph.D. so he's a little bit highest.

[Helen Panett]

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. So that's obviously one interesting direction that your research is taking. And you knew I was going to ask the traditional final question about current projects. Is there anything else you're working, working on, or is that the main project.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

I'm also working on because I'm obsessed with mythology. Something that I keep coming back to is something that I loved because my name is Cassandra and Greek mythology and stuff like that. I think I was always been embedded into mythology and Irish mythology I love. And because my husband studies philosophy, identity and stuff, I was talking to him one day, I was like, huh, isn't this funny that this artist in Ireland is considered the bog king, et cetera, et cetera. Outside of Ireland, Hosier the artist, he's considered to be like this magical entity and magical creature coming out of the woodland to save a soul, et cetera. And he's a very political, active figure, et cetera. And I kept telling my husband, huh, that's interesting. And he said, why don't we write a paper about it? So actually, last May, we went to the Spanish association of Irish Studies and Culture conference and we presented a paper. And I want to come back to it again because it's very interesting to see how masculinity is. It keeps changing and identity in Ireland keeps changing. Of course, it's something movable. And Hosier is now one of these representations of Irish identity with this mythological background and this mythologized identity of what Irish should be like, I don't know. But of course it's not, because it's just an outside of Ireland idea. If you ask inside of Ireland, they're like, what do we come from the book? What's happening? And American people or Spanish or whatever, they're like, ooh, Celtic cultures, we love them. So it's something that I would like to come back to, like these new identities that are coming about and it's happening elsewhere, because Florence Welch from Florence on the Machine, she has also this mystical way about her. Like, she's like the goddess and Hosir is the king. It's something like that. I don't know. It's happening all around.

[Helen Panett]

Very interesting. I mean, I can see it's sort of a continuity with the book, but also really going off in pretty interesting new directions. So you'll have to keep us posted. And. And if there's a book, you can come back and. And talk to us about mythical creatures coming from the bug.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

I would love to.

[Helen Panett]

Well, thank you so much for your time today. We've been talking about masculinity and identity in Irish literature. Heroes, Lads and Fathers, currently available. From really, really interesting into this disciplinary approach to. To a really interesting subject. So thank you so much for your.

[Cassandra S. Tolidalope]

Time, Ellen, for having me. It was love.