The literature of Northern Ireland: spectral borderlands

In: New directions in Irish and Irish American literature

Abstract

"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"--