History, memory, trauma in contemporary British and Irish fiction

History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction to monografia poświęcona zagadnieniom historii, pamięci i traumy, ich wzajemnym relacjom oraz sposobom ich przedstawiania i funkcjonowania w wybranych powieściach dwojga współczesnych pisarzy brytyjskich: Pat Barker i Kazuo Ishiguro, oraz dwóch pisarzy irlandzkich: Sebastiana Barry i Johna Banville’a. W części teoretycznej książki, autorka przedstawia stan badań nad burzliwą relacją pomiędzy historią a fikcją literacką, szeroko rozumianą pamięcią oraz teorią traumy. Część analityczna została podzielona na dwie sekcje: „Historia i trauma”, oraz „Pamięć i trauma”. W sekcji pierwszej, analizując powieści Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, Another World, Double Vision) i Sebastiana Barry (The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, A Long Long Way, The Secret Scripture i On Canaan’s Side), autorka zestawia pojęcia traumy zbiorowej i traumy indywidualnej, podkreśla podobieństwa i różnice w podejściu do I wojny światowej wynikające z różnych doświadczeń historycznych Brytyjczyków i Irlandczyków. Autorka stawia również hipotezę, że trauma jest szczególnie odpowiednim tropem dla pisarzy podejmujących próbę rewidowania historii – białe plamy historii często zakrywają głębokie rany. W sekcji drugiej autorka porównuje twórczość Kazuo Ishiguro (A Pale View of Hills, When We Were Orphans) i Johna Banville’a (Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light) wskazując na liczne podobieństwa w podejściu obu pisarzy do zagadnienia pamięci indywidualnej i tożsamości, które, jak dotąd, nie zostały opisane w licznych opracowaniach krytycznych na temat twórczości tych słynnych pisarzy. Odczytanie omawianych utworów przez pryzmat pojęcia pamięci narracyjnej i pamięci traumatycznej pozwala na uzasadnienie zabiegów fabularnych i formalnych, które dotąd uważano za niejasne lub niekonsekwentne. Posługując się interdyscyplinarnymi narzędziami badawczymi wypracowanymi między innymi przez Cathy Caruth, Shoshanę Felman, Dominica LaCaprę i Irene Kacandes, autorka przedstawia nowatorskie propozycje interpretacji utworów znanych i tłumaczonych na język polski pisarzy.History, memory and trauma as well as their complex interrelations have been lying at the centre of interdisciplinary academic debates since the end of the previous century. These are also themes with which contemporary writers and other artists are increasingly preoccupied in their work. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction is an attempt at analysing the relationship between history, memory and trauma in the selected novels of Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville. The author examines the notion of memory in a variety of contexts: collective memory in the historical novels of Barker and Barry, individual memory as a foundation of the sense of self in the novels of Banville and Ishiguro, and traumatic memory in the novels of Barry and Ishiguro. By applying the theoretical framework of trauma studies to the work of those renowned writers, History, Memory, Trauma offers new interpretations of their novels. The author demonstrates that contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages the reader in the role of co-witness who enables the process of working through trauma

Irish history in the novels of Sebastian Barry

Critics of contemporary Irish literature note a surprising omnipresence of historical themes in the novels of a country whose present day is so eventful. Such prominent writers like, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe or Sebastian Barry seem to be immersed in Irish twentieth-century history and the national myth. Barry’s theatre plays and novels usually question the official, heroic version of history by focusing on the forgotten and the marginalised: loyalist Catholics, single women, children. The present article analyses two of his novels: The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) and The Secret Scripture (2008), which share some of the characters and are both set in Sligo in the first half of the twentieth century. The present article claims that in the ten years that separates the publication of these novels, Barry’s attitude to history visibly changed. Contrary to the opinion of most critics, Barry’s approach evolved from the uncompromising revisionism of the earlier novel to considerable scepticism about the possibility of objective history and historical truth in the later work. The article also suggests that tracing this process allows the reader to appreciate the writer’s motivation as an attempt to deal with the taboos of the past before embarking on the problems of the present

Ireland’s “broken” homes in the novels of Tana French

This paper argues that Tana French effectively uses the figure of house and home in order to comment critically on the state of the nation in her Irish crime novels. The analysis focuses on three se-lected novels: The Likeness (2008), Broken Harbor (2012) and The Searcher (2020). It demonstrates that in The Likeness, French uses the historical and literary tradition of the Big House to comment on the economic and class tensions during the period of the economic boom known as the Celtic Tiger.2 In Broken Harbor, she employs the gothic mode of writing in her portrayal of the consequences of the credit crunch. And finally, in The Searcher, she debunks the myth of rural Ireland as a pastoral retreat and safe haven. The paper applies Susan Fraiman’s notions of “shelter writing” and “alternative homemakers” (2017) in order to show how French uses domestic space and domestic rituals in order to problematize gender stereo-types and undermine conservative expectations about the nuclear [email protected] Piątek is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests are memory and trauma in contemporary British, Irish and American fiction, the influence of film on fiction, and ecocriticism.Jagiellonian University in Kraków, PolandBecker, S. 1999. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Clark, D. 2013. Mean streets, new lives: the representations of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish crime fiction. In: P. Villar-Argaiz (ed.), Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature, 255-267. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Corrigan, M. 2020. Tana French’s The Searcher nods to John Ford’s famous Western with a story of a loner on the hunt for a lost teen. Washington Post 5 October, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/tana-frenchs-the-searcher-nods-to-john-fords-famous-western-with-the-story-of-a-loner-on-the-hunt-for-a-lost-teen/2020/10/05/17de293a-06a4-11eb-a166-dc429b380d10_story.html.Fogarty, A. 2000. Uncanny families: neo-gothic motifs and the theme of social change in contemporary Irish women’s fiction. Irish University Review 30(1): 59-81.Fraiman, S. 2017. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press.French, T. 2020. The Searcher. London/New York: Viking.French, T. 2012. Broken Harbor. London/New York: Penguin Group.French, T. 2008. The Likeness. London/New York: Viking.Freud, S. 1953-74 [1917-19]. The uncanny. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Stratchey, vol. XVII, 219-53. London: Hogarth Press.Gregorek, J. 2014. Fables of foreclosure: Tana French’s police procedurals of reces-sionary Ireland. In: J. H. Kim (ed.), Class and Culture in Crime Fiction: Essays on Works in English since 1970s, 149-74. Jefferson NC: McFarland.Harper, G. 2020. Closeness and cruelty: on Tana French’s The Searcher. Los Angeles Review of Books 29th November, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/closeness-and-cruelty-on-tana-frenchs-the-searcher/.Macfarlane, R. 2015. The eeriness of the English countryside. The Guardian 10 April, www.theguardian.com/books/ 2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-mac-farlane.Mannion, E. 2016. Introduction. A path to the emerald noir: The rise of the Irish detec-tive novel. In: E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 1-16. London: Palgrave Macmillan.McHale, B. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London/New York: Routledge.Norris, C. 2004. The Big House: space, place and identity in Irish fiction. New Hibernia Review 8(1): 107-121.O’Brien, C. 2013. Commuter belt regions worst hit by downturn, survey finds. Irish Times5 January, online.O’Connor, M. 2017. Green fields and blue roads: the melancholy of the girl walker in Irish women’s fiction. Critical Survey 29(1): 90 -104.O’Toole, F. 2011. Afterword: From Chandler and “Playboy” to the contemporary crime wave. In: D. Burke (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, 358-361. Dublin: Liberties Press.Peterson, S. 2016. Voicing the unspeakable: Tana French’s Dublin murder squad. In E. Mannion (ed.), The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, 107-120. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Peterson, S. 2014. Murder in the ghost estate: Crimes of the Celtic Tiger in Tana French’s Broken Harbor. Clues 32(1): 71-80.Rauchbauer, O. 1992. The Big House and Irish history: an introductory sketch. In: O. Rauchbauer (ed.), The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, 1-17. Dublin: Lilliput Press.Reddy, M. T. 2014. Authority and Irish cultural memory in Faithful Place and Broken Harbor. Clues 32(1): 81-93.Schaffer, R. 2014. Introduction. Tana French and Irish crime fiction. Clues 32(1): 9-12.Schofield, A. 2013. The Returned Yank as site of memory in Irish popular culture. Journal of American Studies 47(4): 1175 -95.36 (1/2022)375