Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions

Book excerpt: Twentieth-century Irish fiction powerfully reflects the intensely political nature of the Irish experience for the last hundred years, and earlier. The essays in Troubled Histories, Troubled Fictions: Twentieth Century Anglo-Irish Prose focus upon the various ways in which the work of authors otherwise as diverse as James Joyce, James Stephens, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Eimar O'Duffy, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, Julia O'Faolain, and a number of recent women writers, synchronizes with items that are, or were, high on the agenda of Irish politics. Discussion ranges from the political and ideological use to which Joyce puts etymology, sex, and early Irish history, the symbolical importance of the Big House, and the politics of sexuality in the immediate post-independence period, to representations of the recent Troubles.