Haunted Historiographies: The Rhetoric of Ideology in Postcolonial Irish Fiction - Hardcover

Schultz, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071909092X ISBN 13: 9780719090929

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The spectres of history haunt Irish fiction. In this compelling study, Matthew Schultz maps these rhetorical hauntings across a wide range of postcolonial Irish novels, and defines the spectre as a non-present presence that simultaneously symbolises and analyses an overlapping of Irish myth and Irish history.

By exploring this exchange between literary discourse and historical events, Haunted historiographies provides literary historians and cultural critics with a theory of the spectre that exposes the various complex ways in which novelists remember, represent and reinvent historical narrative. It juxtaposes canonical and non-canonical novels that complicate long-held assumptions about four definitive events in modern Irish history – the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, the Second World War and the Northern Irish Troubles – to demonstrate how historiographical Irish fiction from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Sebastian Barry is both a product of Ireland’s colonial history and also the rhetorical means by which a post-colonial culture has emerged.

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About this title

About the Author

Matthew Schultz is the Writing Center Director at Vassar College

From the Back Cover

The spectres of history haunt Irish fiction. In this compelling study, Matthew Schultz maps these rhetorical hauntings across a wide range of postcolonial Irish novels, and defines the spectre as a non-present presence that simultaneously symbolises and analyses an overlapping of Irish myth and Irish history. By exploring this exchange between literary discourse and historical events, Haunted historiographies provides literary historians and cultural critics a theory of the spectre that exposes the various complex ways in which novelists remember, represent and reinvent historical narrative.

This book juxtaposes canonical and non-canonical novels that complicate long-held assumptions about four definitive events in modern Irish history: the Great Famine, the Irish Revolution, the Second World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Schultz demonstrates how the spectre operates in fiction as a meta-critical trope, not simply for overturning the validity of founding Nationalist mythologies in favour of Revisionist narratives, but for exposing the process by which such histories are constructed. Identifying the spectre as central in these novels helps us to recognise historiographical Irish fiction both as a product of Ireland's colonial history, and also as the rhetorical means by which a post-colonial culture has emerged. In short, recognising spectrality as a theoretical lens through which to view Irish fiction from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to Roddy Doyle and Sebastian Barry, Schultz heightens our awareness of re-emergent cultural factors that originally led to the Irish artist's dual aesthetic and political identity during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: colonial trauma, religious discrimination and political insularity.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 071909092X
• ISBN 13: 9780719090929
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216