Trauma And History In The Irish Novel

The desire to engage and confront traumatic subjects was a facet of Irish literature for much of the twentieth century. Yet, just as Irish society has adopted a more direct and open approach to the past, so too have Irish authors evolved in their response to, and literary uses of, trauma. In Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel, Costello-Sullivan considers the ways in which the Irish canon not only represents an ongoing awareness of trauma as a literary and cultural force, but also how this representation has shifted since the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. While earlier trauma narratives center predominantly on the role of silence and the individual and/or societal suffering that traumas induce, twenty-first-century Irish narratives increasingly turn from just the recognition of traumatic experiences toward exploring and representing the process of healing and recovery both structurally and narratively. Through a series of keenly observed close readings, Costello-Sullivan explores the work of Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry. In highlighting the power of narrative to amend and address memory and trauma, Costello-Sullivan argues that these works reflect a movement beyond merely representing trauma toward also representing the possibility of recovery from it.

This book considers the widespread treatment of traumatic memory in Irish fiction of the past thirty-five years. It focuses on both trauma fiction and the historical novel, and the way certain novelists looked to early events in twentieth century Irish history to engage the recent political violence in Northern Ireland beginning in 1969.

History, memory and trauma as well as their complex interrelations have been lying at the centre of interdisciplinary academic debates since the end of the previous century. These are also themes with which contemporary writers and other artists are increasingly preoccupied in their work. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction is an attempt at analysing the relationship between history, memory and trauma in the selected novels of Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville. The author examines the notion of memory in a variety of contexts: collective memory in the historical novels of Barker and Barry, individual memory as a foundation of the sense of self in the novels of Banville and Ishiguro, and traumatic memory in the novels of Barry and Ishiguro. By applying the theoretical framework of trauma studies to the work of those renowned writers, History, Memory, Trauma offers new interpretations of their novels. The author demonstrates that contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages the reader in the role of co-witness who enables the process of working through trauma.

Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize • Winner of the 2021 Kate O'Brien Award • Winner of the 2021 Dalkey Emerging Writer Award Sinéad Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret. No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie. But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. And Sinéad needs them both. As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland; about women's stories and women's struggles; about seizing the moment to be free. Wildly funny, desperately tragic, inventive and irrepressible, As You Were introduces a brilliant voice in Irish fiction with a book that is absolutely of our times.

This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) was followed by a 'traumatic silence.' It achieves this by revealing an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. These testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish, and nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making, demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised, and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans--both men and women--self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to 'heal' the 'spiritual wounds' of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptio

Irish detective fiction has enjoyed an international readership for over a decade, appearing on best-seller lists across the globe. But its breadth of hard-boiled and amateur detectives, historical fiction, and police procedurals has remained somewhat marginalized in academic scholarship. Exploring the work of some of its leading writers—including Peter Tremayne, John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Tana French, Jane Casey, and Benjamin Black—The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel opens new ground in Irish literary criticism and genre studies. It considers the detective genre’s position in Irish Studies and the standing of Irish authors within the detective novel tradition. Contributors: Carol Baraniuk, Nancy Marck Cantwell, Brian Cliff, Fiona Coffey, Charlotte J. Headrick, Andrew Kincaid, Audrey McNamara, and Shirley Peterson.

This volume studies the manifestations of female trauma through the exploration of multiple wounds, inflicted on both body and mind (Caruth 1996, 3) and the soul of Irish women from Northern Ireland and the Republic within a contemporary context, and in literary works written at the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond. These artistic manifestations connect tradition and modernity, debunk myths, break the silence with the exposure of uncomfortable realities, dismantle stereotypes and reflect reality with precision. Women’s issues and female experiences depicted in contemporary fiction may provide an explanation for past and present gender dynamics, revealing a pathway for further renegotiation of gender roles and the achievement of equilibrium and equality between sexes. These works might help to seal and heal wounds both old and new and offer solutions to the quandaries of tomorrow.