Rewriting the nation: Edna O'Brien, Patrick McCabe and the second wave of modern Irish fiction.

摘要

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of the contemporary Irish novel in the current Irish condition of postcolonial/post-independence identity formation. By comparing the current post-independence writers Edna O'Brien and Patrick McCabe, who deal with a rethinking and redefinition of Irish tradition, to the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, the generation writing immediately before and following Irish independence, I demonstrate how the contemporary writers reject certain Revivalist tendencies including that of the romantic backward gaze as a way of recouping the nativist identity.; In Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy, A Pagan Place, House of Splendid Isolation, Down By The River, and Wild Decembers and Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, The Dead School, and Breakfast on Pluto, the two writers discursively demonstrate the failure of the attempt at reviving nativist traditions as an identity-building strategy while they still acknowledge the weight of history and inherited discourses in the era of global cultures. The easy belief that an Irish cultural specificity exists and can be imported in toto into another century is gone with the Revivalists of the early twentieth century and these two writers provide very different models for the "translation" of Irish culture. They conclude that in the face of today's multi-cultural world narrow-minded romanticized nationalist rhetoric is no longer enough to sustain the idea of a nation.; As Ireland is the first nation to gain independence from England in the twentieth century it is one of the few postcolonial nations to have produced a generation of writers who are twice removed from the generation who came to maturity under colonial rule. My project thus provides a study of a very important era in Irish literature and postcolonial and cultural studies in general.