'Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Irish Novel'
Citation:
Eve Patten, 'Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Irish Novel', Studia Philologia, 69, 3, 2024, 47 - 64Download Item:
Abstract:
This paper evaluates the capacity of the contemporary
Northern Irish novel to act as an agent of transmission for a ‘post-Troubles’
readership, one distanced by a generation from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement
that symbolised the partial end of sectarian violence. The critic Liam Harte
suggests that “no part of modern Europe (if not the world) has greater claim than
Northern Ireland to the mantle of most-narrativized region”, but the transmissive
function of fictional works in this context remain under-critiqued. Here, I assess
the aspirations of novelistic narrative to cater for what Premesh Lalu has
described, in the context of post-apartheid South African art forms, as ‘psychic
repair’ (Undoing Apartheid, 2023). The essay engages the 2018 novel Milkman, by
Northern Irish author Anna Burns, to ask how fictional narrative transmits the
detail of the past across a generation first, in parallel to other literary and artistic
genres, and second, in relation to an expanding archive of ongoing legal tribunals
and government incentives directed towards the production of an ‘official history’
for Northern Ireland. Through attention to the self-conscious foregrounding of
forensic reading practice by Burns and fellow writers, I show the necessary place
of fictional recovery in the field of political and cultural memory.
Author's Homepage:
http://people.tcd.ie/epattenDescription:
PUBLISHED
Author: Patten, Eve
Type of material:
Journal ArticleCollections
Series/Report no:
Studia Philologia;69;
3;
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Full text availableSubject (TCD):
Anglo-Irish literature, poetry , IRELAND , Literary CriticismDOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2024.3.03Metadata
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