The Literature of Northern Ireland

Through close readings of texts by playwright Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns, this book examines the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. Ruprecht Fadem argues that literary texts address this tension through spectral, bordered metaphors and juxtapositions of the ancient and the contemporary.

“One of the strongest things about this book is the analysis of drama, poetry and fiction in one space. … the text as a whole creates a successful scholarly project, unpacking the dramatic, poetic and fictional texts with critical skill.” (Miriam Mara, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 25 (4), August, 2017) 

“For readers and teachers less familiar with the politics and history of Northern Ireland, it offers context and overview from partition to the start of the Troubles, the Peace process, and the continuing fractures and tensions within Northern Irish communities. … it offers in-depth studies of three current Northern Irish women writers who have found new ways to articulate the challenges of representation that Heaney recognized.” (Michele Holmgren, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 47 (1-2), January-April, 2016)

“This volume is unique in that it examines Northern Ireland (rather that the Republic of Ireland), and its argument is organized around three principal writers, all of them women. … The study is well researched and carefully developed. … Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” (D. W. Madden, Choice, September, 2015)

"Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem's The Literature of Northern Ireland offers an original, timely, and theoretical contribution to the various processes in which Ireland's partition formed and fostered particularly aspects of twentieth-century Irish literature. Viewing the work of Anne Devlin, Medbh McGuckian, and Anna Burns through a distinctive postmodernist lens, Fadem offers readers an informed and insightful guide to understanding the defamiliarizing juxtapositions which characterize much Irish literary production and details how partition engendered an ever-present awareness of borders - physical, psychic and emotional - in the island's literary and cultural artifacts." - Brian Ó Conchubhair, Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame, USA

"The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands is an important contribution to Irish Studies in the wake of the peace process. It enables us to revisit the work of McGuckian, Devlin, and Burns as sites of trauma. In describing these writers as inhabitants of a spectral borderland, Fadem brings new life to their work through her nuanced post-structuralist and feminist readings. She reminds us that these writers' negotiations of 'deathly crises develop less as the romantic, heroic martyrdoms of earlier writing and more as a bordered hauntedness or despair.' In Northern Ireland's spectral borderland, the peace that is always running up against the memory of death is a fragile yet enduring presence. Fadem's provocative readings allow us to make the important journey back into trauma so that we return all the stronger for the experience." - Michael O'Sullivan, Associate Professor of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

"Provocative, challenging, and sometimes daring, Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem's The Literature of Northern Ireland explores the unique position of the Irish writer in Northern Ireland. In attending to both historical contexts and contemporary narratives, Fadem not only invites us to consider the intersection between the creative, the critical, and the material, but also the extent to which particular forms of agency and disempowerment have shaped Irish literature. This much-needed collective assessment of the various films, plays, poems, and narratives produced by these powerful Irish women artists and writers, is sure to stir critical and political emotions, both in Ireland and internationally." - Padraig Kirwan, Senior Lecturer, English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, USA.