Literary perspectives: Northern Ireland
Shaking the hand of history
Critic Matt McGuire continues Eurozine’s Literary Perspectives series with a focus on Northern Ireland. While the Northern Irish literary tradition is closely bound up with the experience of sectarian violence, he writes, contemporary poets and prose writers defy the assumption that “the troubles” are all there is to the country’s literature. The attempt to deal in literary form with the ideological baggage of Northern Ireland’s past is combined with an exploration of identity in the twenty-first century.
