Content area
This dissertation will examine how recent Northern Irish novelists have chosen to represent and respond to the lasting impact of the Troubles after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In particular, my first chapter will explore how texts written during the peace process and after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) deal with transgenerational trauma and its continuing impact on post-conflict Northern Ireland by focusing on the Troubles Bildungsroman. In my second chapter, I will look at how contemporary authors focus on recovering “lost narratives” from the past as a means of approaching reconciliation. Finally, in my third chapter I will examine how a tired and clichéd genre like the thriller has been reimagined and reclaimed as an appropriate means of representing the sectarian conflict and its traumatic aftermath. In order the explore these issues, trauma theory, which has been successfully used to examine narrative representations about the Holocaust and the American slave trade, will be employed as a theoretical framework to analyze how recent fictional narratives about the Troubles attempt to represent and come to terms with the historical and individual trauma in Northern Ireland. Additionally, I will incorporate Jacque Derrida’s notions about archivization and forgiveness, which have a strong affinity with topics related to trauma, such as the return of the repressed and the impact of historical suffering on the individual and national psyche.