Post-traumatic realism : representations of history in recent Irish novels

Abstract

The aim of my essay is to describe major tendencies in contemporary Irish prose writing concerned with historical and political issues. The diversity of the themes and attitudes to the past necessitates a classification of the writings into several various groups of novels whereas my analysis of the modes of representing the intratextual universe paves the way for identifying a single literary convention (post-traumatic realism) which is typical of the works under discussion. Many of the quoted authors subscribe to historical revisionism which undermines the received historical narrative in Ireland and questions its aggressively nationalist model of patriotism. The novels by Sebastian Barry, Robert McLiam Wilson, Edna O’Brien or Julia O’Faolain, to name just a few, contest that model by demonstrating that it leads to violence, cultural stagnation and petrifying political divisions both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. In the age of the epistemological levelling of historiographic discourse and literary fiction the novels discussed in the essay meaningfully contribute to the debate over the Irish nation’s attitude to their own history and the need to conclude the painful chapters of the past connected with the Civil War as well as with the social and religious conflicts of the twentieth century.