Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles

Winner of the British Association for Comtemporary Literary Stuides (BACLS) monograph prize The period since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has seen a sustained decrease in violence and, at the same time, Northern Ireland has undergone a literary renaissance, with a fresh generation of writers exploring innovative literary forms. This open access book explores contemporary Northern Irish fiction and how the ‘post’-conflict period has led writers to a renewed engagement with intimacy and intimate life. Magennis draws on affect and feminist theory to examine depictions of intimacy, pleasure and the body in their writings and shows how intimate life in Northern Ireland is being reshaped and re-written. Featuring short reflective pieces from some of today’s most compelling Northern Irish Writers, including Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Bernie McGill and David Park, this book provides authoritative insights into how a contemporary engagement with intimacy provides us with new ways to understand Northern Irish identity, selfhood and community. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

‘Each fantasy chosen begin’: the music of The Divine Comedy

This article considers the cultural and social context for the music of the Northern Irish band The Divine Comedy. It focuses on three mid-1990s albums – Liberation (1993), Promenade (1994) and Casanova (1996) – and debates the significance of this performance of alternative Ulster masculinity during the peace process. It will detail the lyrical obsession with a very particular type of imagined Anglo-Irishness during the first two of these albums, and then consider the complicated uses of the ‘Britpop’ genre in Casanova. This music is baroque, literary and written by an Anglican bishop's son, Neil Hannon, who grew up in Enniskillen during the Troubles. It will consider how Hannon cobbles together an acceptable identity through the use of literary pretentiousness and a carefully crafted pop persona

Sons of Ulster

Both masculinity and the Northern Irish conflict have been the subjects of a great deal of recent scholarship, yet there is a dearth of material on Northern Irish masculinity. Northern Ireland has a remarkable literary output relative to its population, but the focus of critical attention has been on poetry rather than the fine novels that have been written in and about Ulster. This book goes some way towards remedying the deficiency in critical attention to the Northern Irish novel and the lack of gendered approaches to Northern Irish literature and society.Sons of Ulster explores the representation of masculinity within a number of Northern Irish novels written since the mid-1990s, focusing on works by Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson. One of the key aims of the book is to disrupt notions of a hegemonic Northern Irish masculinity based on violent conflict and hyper-masculine sectarian rhetoric. The author uses the three sections of the text to represent the three key facets of Northern Irish masculinity: bodies, performances and subjectivity bound up with violence

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men. It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument. The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago. Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland. The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the grotesque or abjected maternal