Title: Trauma and history in the Irish novel
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.
Subjects: Psychic trauma in literature, History in literature, English fiction, Intellectual life, History and criticism, In literature, Irish authors, English fiction, irish authors, history and criticism, English fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Ireland, intellectual life, Ireland, in literature, Great britain, intellectual life
Places: Ireland, Northern Ireland
Time periods: 20th century