Northern Irish Fiction after the Troubles

Abstract

This chapter addresses Northern Irish fiction published since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It considers how political changes in the province have both triggered radical aesthetic innovation and accommodated a certain stasis in form. Drawing on the theories of Jacques Rancière, the chapter investigates the means by which some contemporary novels and short stories by Northern Irish writers reflect a politically expedient vision of a shared past and future, one that necessarily excludes what Rancière calls dissensus and tends to be formally conservative, while others offer a potentially dissensual vision of the post-Troubles North in both form and content. At an overarching level, the chapter questions how legitimate it is to refer to this literary corpus as being ‘post-Troubles’ since all of the authors discussed engage to some extent with the violent past and its ongoing legacies in a still deeply divided society.