Book contents
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Times
- Part II Spaces
- Part III Forms of Experience
- Chapter 11 The Irish Realist Novel
- Chapter 12 Faith, Secularism, and Sacred Institutions
- Chapter 13 Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture
- Chapter 14 Violence, Trauma, Recovery
- Chapter 15 Modes of Witnessing and Ireland’s Institutional History
- Coda: Edna O’Brien and Eimear McBride
- Part IV Practices, Institutions, and Audiences
- Index
Chapter 14 - Violence, Trauma, Recovery
from Part III - Forms of Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2020
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Irish Literature in Transition
- Irish Literature in Transition, 1980–2020
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Series Preface
- General Acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Times
- Part II Spaces
- Part III Forms of Experience
- Chapter 11 The Irish Realist Novel
- Chapter 12 Faith, Secularism, and Sacred Institutions
- Chapter 13 Writing the Tiger: Economics and Culture
- Chapter 14 Violence, Trauma, Recovery
- Chapter 15 Modes of Witnessing and Ireland’s Institutional History
- Coda: Edna O’Brien and Eimear McBride
- Part IV Practices, Institutions, and Audiences
- Index
Summary
The violence that infected the North during the decades of the Troubles was represented in a variety of forms as a generation of writers attended to how its intertwined narratives on both sides of the sectarian divide were articulated as shared experiences of national trauma in dire need of understanding and representation through the language of literature. Beginning with Seamus Heaney’s reflections in ‘Cessation 1994’ on the overwhelming difficulties but also undeniable opportunities of envisaging pathways of historical, political, and economic recovery on the eve of the Belfast Agreement, this chapter proceeds by reading Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto and Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs as two novels that continued the unfinished work in Irish literature after 1998 of representing the traumas of violence from national and global perspectives (and thus not only in the Irish context of the Troubles).
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- Irish Literature in Transition: 1980–2020 , pp. 263 - 277Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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