Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature Tracing Counter-Histories

by Lehner, Stefanie

• ISBN13: 9780230241701
• ISBN10: 0230241700
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book develops an innovative Irish-Scottish postcolonial approach by galvanizing Emmanuel Levinas' ethics with the socio-cultural category of the 'subaltern'. It sheds new light on contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction, exploring how these writings interact with the recent restructuring of the three state-formations in Ireland and Scotland.

Author Biography

Stefanie Lehner is Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published in the areas of Scottish and Irish-studies, including an essay on Northern Irish fiction that won the 2007 BAIS Essay Prize and appeared in the Irish Studies Review.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction Irish-Scottish Crosscurrents: Towards an Archipelagic Subaltern AesthEthics
(D)evolutions? Transformations in the Scottish & Irish ImagiNation
'Buried in Silence and Oblivion': Subaltern Counter-Histories in the Scottish-Irish Archipelago
James Kelman's 'Naval History' and Robert McLiam Wilson's 'The Dreamed'
'History stands so still, it gathers dust': Mapping Ethical Disjunctures in Contemporary Ireland and Scotland
Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and James Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free
'Measuring Silences': The Northern Irish Peace Process as Arkhe-Taintment?
Glenn Patterson's That Which Was and Eoin McNamee's The Ultras
'Un-Remembering History': Traumatic Herstories in Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction
Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm
Feminine Futures?: Gender Trouble in the Allegorical ImagiNation
Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine and Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index