Cultural Trauma in Contemporary Northern Irish Literature

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2020-07-17
Language
en
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Abstract
The Troubles may have officially ended twenty years ago, but they are far from forgotten. Many cultural expressions regarding the Troubles are made every year, implying that the recent past is not over and done with and that the trauma of those years still lingers in the cultural sphere. This research aims to figure out how contemporary novels Milkman and Country mediate cultural trauma. This aim is achieved by analysing the two novels as trauma novels and as products of a traumatised culture. This is done using Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory on cultural trauma as a framework. The results found that while both novels mediate both personal and cultural trauma, they are not the traditionally polarizing cultural trauma narratives that are associated with trauma representations. This result implies that cultural trauma representations shift in their perspective and that identifying victim and perpetrator becomes more nuanced as a culture slowly moves on.
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Faculteit der Letteren