The Literature of Northern Ireland - (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature) by M Ruprecht Fadem (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands theorizes how Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. It argues that the rearrangement of the island and creation of multiple states produced two major effects in the North: it incited concomitant fractures within self and society and interrupted experiences of place. In this 'interregnum,' the whole arc of Irish time crystallized, the subject as keenly aware of ancient events as those of today and all while awaiting a more just political future. These conditions are represented in the literature through a self-contradictory poetics that fuses ancient and contemporary literary styles. Age-old Irish tropes are deployed within recognizably postmodern styles in works that rely, particularly, on specter and scrim: haunting, deathly characters and metaphors and perilous, pivotal borders. This spectral borderlands aesthetic captures the peculiar temporality of daily life and takes inspiration, chiefly, from Samuel Beckett. This position is outlined in Chapter One and fully elaborated through sustained analyses of literary writing by Belfast women writers: poet Medbh McGuckian, dramatist and fiction writer Anne Devlin, and novelist Anna Burns. Chapters on each explicate their distinctive deployments of the spectral borderlands: Devlin's self-contradiction, McGuckian's silence, and Burns' doubt"

Book Synopsis

Through close readings of texts by playwright Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns, this book examines the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. Ruprecht Fadem argues that literary texts address this tension through spectral, bordered metaphors and juxtapositions of the ancient and the contemporary.

Review Quotes

"One of the strongest things about this book is the analysis of drama, poetry and fiction in one space. ... the text as a whole creates a successful scholarly project, unpacking the dramatic, poetic and fictional texts with critical skill." (Miriam Mara, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 25 (4), August, 2017)

"For readers and teachers less familiar with the politics and history of Northern Ireland, it offers context and overview from partition to the start of the Troubles, the Peace process, and the continuing fractures and tensions within Northern Irish communities. ... it offers in-depth studies of three current Northern Irish women writers who have found new ways to articulate the challenges of representation that Heaney recognized." (Michele Holmgren, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 47 (1-2), January-April, 2016)

"This volume is unique in that it examines Northern Ireland (rather that the Republic of Ireland), and its argument is organized around three principal writers, all of them women. ... The study is well researched and carefully developed. ... Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." (D. W. Madden, Choice, September, 2015)

About the Author

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, USA.