Introduction

Abstract

This book examines Ireland since partition, its literature, and its “Troubles.” It offers a theory regarding the use of particular tropes and styles in recent literature coming out of the Northern territory. The rearrangement of the island and creation of multiple states produced two major effects, I argue: it incited concomitant fractures of place, self, and society and propelled the region into a state of political suspension. Composed at the meeting place of speech and silence, language and gibberish, literary production is a key modality through which this politics of the location, as well as the history of the statelet and the crisis of Northern Irish identity, are refracted and clarified. Consonant with wider views on Northern Irish literature, a starting point for this book is the recognition that much Northern Irish writing is postmodern in style, form, and tone. The argument rests on the further suggestion that imaginative work is crafted and elaborated through longstanding Irish literary tropes—primarily specter and scrim—within distinctly postmodern aesthetics of abstraction, difficulty, interruption, and fragmentation. Taking inspiration chiefly from the work of Samuel Beckett, this spectral borderlands locates the text within a vast conceptual canvas that captures the peculiar temporality of daily life in the North. Partition functions as an interruption in which the whole arc of Irish time crystallized; inundated by history, subjects are as keenly aware of ancient events as those of today, all the while awaiting a more just political future.