Re-Imagining Tradition: Identity and Depictions of Ireland in Anne Enright’s The Green Road

Despite attempts to label her a postnationalist writer, Anne Enright’s fiction is rooted in the Irish landscape geographically, psychologically and emotionally. Enright reimagines traditional places and charges them with new symbolic value. In The Green Road Enright uses a number of narrative techniques to question given notions of identity, both individual and collective. A postcolonial identity comes through in the novel and is mirrored by its narrative structure. This article will explore how non-linear narrative, interspersed with gaps in narrative continuity and memory, is a way of reimagining, rather than transcending, questions of nation and identity. It also sets out to analyse narrative strategies and depictions of Ireland and Irishness in the novel. This article will also look at how economy and monetary elements are embedded in the narrative and at how they might be seen as part of an attempt to describe Ireland and Irish identity.En dépit des tentatives visant à la qualifier d’écrivain « postnationaliste », la fiction d’Anne Enright s’enracine dans le paysage irlandais de manière géographique, psychologique et émotionnelle. Enright réinvente les lieux traditionnels et leur confère une nouvelle valeur symbolique. Dans The Green Road, Enright utilise un certain nombre de techniques narratives pour remettre en question des notions identitaires, individuelles et collectives. Une identité postcoloniale transparaît dans le roman et se reflète dans sa structure narrative. Cet article explorera comment la narration non linéaire, entrecoupée de lacunes dans la continuité narrative et la mémoire, est un moyen de réinventer les questions de nation et d’identité plutôt que de les transcender. Il se propose également d’analyser les stratégies narratives et les représentations de l’Irlande et de l’irlandicité dans le roman. Cet article examinera également la manière dont les éléments économiques et monétaires sont incorporés dans le récit et comment ils pourraient être considérés comme faisant partie d’une tentative de description de l’Irlande et de l’identité irlandaise

Postcolonial theory and literary practice in Ireland, 1980-2015: Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright

This thesis analyses depictions of nationhood and identity in some contemporary Irish fictions through a postcolonial lens. In particular, the thesis focuses on two writers, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright, and a specific period, namely the beginning of the 1980s, when postcolonial theory first started to develop in Ireland, and 2015, when Enright’s novel The Green Road was published. Fiction, and literature more in general, is affected by socio-historical events, and in turn effects potential for social change and transformation. This means that revising Irish identity is also, partly, revising the historical, political and social events that contributed to its construction, and now to its re-invention. This history is referred to by my chosen writers, and their novels engage with historical events and what they mean to the present, both national and individual. I have explored the joint phenomenon of changes in Irish society and the rise of postcolonial theory in the Irish academy, focusing on the relationship between narrative and its context, on definitions and perceptions of Irishness, and on disjointed narrative as a projection of displacement and uprootedness as seen against a postcolonial backdrop, both in terms of the colonial past and post-Independence legacies. I have examined the specific ‘version’ of postcolonial theory which has emerged, partly as a reflection of this inheritance. I have also analysed how the contemporary Irish novel reflects issues of identity that have been characterised through Ireland’s colonial legacy and postcolonial situation. The postcolonial approach of the thesis has argued the importance of considering the subaltern narrative. Additionally, it has explored characterisations that link back to ideas of double colonisation. This formed the basis for assessing to what extent and in what form the novels selected for discussion, which all refuse the linear narratives of both colonial and early versions of nationalism, have enabled or foregrounded a space in which to make subaltern and marginalised voices audible; and to explore and challenge subaltern issues of disempowerment and oppression, with specific attention to aspects of class and gender