Trauma and history in the Irish novel
Subtitle: the return of the dead
By: Robert F. Garratt
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 170
ISBN-13: 9780230250307
Description: 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. The novels have at least one narrative strategy in common: characters that suffer traumatically. Individuals witnessing or participating in an act of violence are portrayed as permanenetly attached to that moment - they are in the grip of their own traumatic history. The sense that history repeats itself, which gnawed at Irish political thought during the 1970s and 1980s, is a central tenet of trauma theory and traumatic experience, and lies at the heart of these novels.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: "Undergoing history": J. G. Farrell's troubles; title: Cyclical history: Julia O'Faolain's No country for young men; title: William Trevor and the voices of history; title: Jennifer Johnston and traumatic memory; title: Representation and trauma in John McGahern's amongst women; title: Return of the dead: Seamus Deane's reading in the dark; title: The contemporary Irish novel.