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Oona Frawley (Ed.), Women and the Decade of Commemorations. Indiana: Indiana University Press., 2021
The substantial displacement of people following the Irish revolution (1916–1923), particularly of women, has little place in the state-sanctioned commemorative history of the period. This migration poses a number of problems for the ‘social remembrance’ (Beiner) of the revolution. How does a community remember when it no longer exists in the geographic place of origin? Drawing on an array of disparate narratives, including letters, memoirs, and fictional self-representation, this chapter aims to recuperate a number of the counter-memories of female revolutionary émigrées in order to consider the spaces available to women for coming to terms with the past within diasporic communities. Furthermore, it explores how these memories of revolution can oscillate between nostalgic and anti-nostalgic remembrance and how less conventional forms of testimony often offer more complex readings of women’s diasporic remembrance than first-person narrative.
On 24 April, 1916, more than 1,000 rebels of the Irish Volunteers and associated organizations under the leadership of Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Eamon de Valera, and others declared an independent Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. At that same moment, tens of thousands of their countrymen were in the British Army, participating in the Great War on the mainland, and many thousands of Irishmen had already been killed in Gallipoli, Salonika, Belgium, France, and elsewhere in service to the crown. This paradox creates the opening for many interesting questions. How did those Irish troops and the Irish public, especially those connected to serving Irish soldiers, react to the Easter Uprising? Most importantly, for the purposes of this paper, what was the collective reaction to Irish service in the Great War immediately following the armistice, and what was the continued impact upon public opinion, political action, and internecine strife throughout the following decades? Using the historical novel “A Long Long Way” as a structural framework for analysis, this paper will address these unspoken realities by comparing the modern memory as reflected in this historical novel to the historical reality as recorded by witnesses and scholars.
Études irlandaises, 2021
Marguerite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Ruud van den Beuken (eds),Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory: Transitions and Transformations, 2016
Through a close reading of Sean O’Faolain and Graham Greene’s autobiographies (Vive Moi and A Sort of Life) I uncover a narrative of crisis that emphasises the individual’s role (or lack ) on a national level. O’Faolain uses the growth of a newly burgeoning Irish Free-state as a metaphor for personal development. He diagnoses an entropic condition where the progress of self and nation has been curtailed through lack of vision and foresight. The post-revolutionary period of the 1920s and 1930s is full of cynicism and despair. O’Faolain’s The Vanishing Hero (1957) diagnoses this disillusionment as endemic across much of 1920s literature. He asserts that the English writer, Graham Greene, was also a product of a lost society. Greene’s writing conveys a sense of a loss of Englishness and the uselessness of not being of the generation who fought during the First World War. Both autobiographies retrospectively explore the anxious and depressed condition of the young writer. This could be seen as a result of overly-intellectual adolescence, but I argue that it is indicative of the claustrophobic and stagnant social scene the writers encountered. As Richard Johnstone observes in The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-thirties – “They shared a profound need for something they felt had been lost from the world, something which would have to be replaced – belief.” Both question their faith and examine their spiritual well being. The English and Irish nations had altered beyond recognition within the authors’ young and inexperienced lifetime, and thus there is a sustained examination of the past in Greene and O’Faolain’s autobiographies.
Through the lens of trauma theory, this dissertation shows that reading the silences in The Dark and Amongst Women can provide ways to explore the main characters’ subjectivities and the stylistic features used to represent traumatic events. This essay posits that, through the unconventional narrative structure in The Dark and the use of silences in Amongst Women, McGahern manages to give two successful representations of trauma. The first chapter analyses how McGahern captures young Mahoney’s fragmented subjectivity, and dramatizes in the very narrative structure of the novel the difficulty that arises in finding an appropriate response to trauma. The second chapter explores the unspeakable void left in Moran by the traumatic experience he suffered during the War of Independence and the consequences of this trauma for his life and his family. This demonstrates how McGahern uses silence as a key rhetorical strategy to represent the ‘endless impact’ (Caruth 1995:7) of traumatic memory, giving an objective representation of the consequences of unresolved trauma. The last chapter explores Luke’s absence in Amongst Women, which provides a counterpoint to the daughters’ submission and serves to further analyse Moran’s symptomatic responses to his traumatic past.
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