Memory and counter-memory in contemporary Irish historical fictions: Lia Mills’ Fallen (2015), Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2016) and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020)

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ABSTRACT The historical novel is frequently denigrated and misunderstood and has generated clashing assessments amongst its current Irish practitioners. Lia Mills’ Fallen (2015), Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2016) and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020) all centre on the period during or after the Easter Rising but consciously set out to displace, complicate, and feminise the narratives associated with it while delving into important historical events which are usually suppressed such as Irish involvement in World War One and the Spanish Flu epidemic. In concentrating on women, dead soldiers, and queer or abjected outsiders, they pointedly foreground subjects usually missing from historical texts. Romance and desire play shaping roles in the plots of these novels but simultaneously they indicate that losses, social disadvantage, and scenes of injustice in the past cannot be cancelled out. What counts as knowable and part of historical memory is weighed up against voided moments and the incoherence of counter-memory. History is at once reclaimed and also estranged in these novels.