Imagined communities in Eoin McNamee’s ‘Resurrection Man’ and ‘The Ultras’

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Imagined Communities Anderson ([2006]. (Revised ed.). London: Verso) discusses the novel as a cultural form which contains ‘a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside’. This article utilises Anderson’s ideas to examine the work of the Northern Irish novelist Eoin McNamee. The author’s imagined Northern Ireland engages with the territory’s recent history and reading his work can aid understanding of the sociological concept of the ‘imagined community’. McNamee presents Northern Ireland as a divided society containing opposed communities, and his novels contain a sustained political argument against British governance in the territory. McNamee constructs a narrative around real-life events and attempts to influence the ways in which they are understood. Both Resurrection Man and The Ultras are of sociological value because they have the potential to aid understanding of Anderson’s best-known theory.