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.
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