Making Peace with the Past? - by Graham Dawson (Paperback)

About the Book

A study of memory and trauma in the conflict in Northern Ireland, and of how personal and collective remembrance has influenced the narratives of reconciliation

Book Synopsis

A study of memory and trauma in the conflict in Northern Ireland, and of how personal and collective remembrance has influenced the narratives of reconciliation

From the Back Cover

This book explores the psychic, cultural and political ramifications of memory within the Irish Troubles. It investigates the traumatic impact of the violence perpetrated since 1969; the antagonistic cultural narratives of memory fashioned and mobilised in this context within public and private arenas; and the conflicts, paradoxes and contradictions involved in 'coming to terms with the past' both before and during the Irish peace process initiated in 1993-94.

The study focuses on personal and collective remembrance within two particular locations: the Unionist communities along the Irish Border, and nationalist Derry. It traces the formation from below of competing public narratives, one concerned with the 'ethnic cleansing' of Protestants by the Irish Republican Army, the other with British state violence on Bloody Sunday; and analyses their subjective roots in specific experiences of fear and loss, their role in ideological struggle, and their complicated relation to private, familial and individual remembering.

Review Quotes

Dawson's book... stands head and shoulders above anything so far published on this vexed subject... it also extremely timely...'

About the Author

Graham Dawson is a Reader in Cultural History at the University of Brighton. His research has focused on the inter-relations between cultural memory, narrative and identity, and on the memory of war in modern times. He is author of Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (Routledge, 1994), and a co-editor and contributor to Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors and Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory (both Transaction, 2004; first published in the Routledge Memory and Narrative series).