The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands [Paperback]

Through close readings of texts by playwright Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns, this book examines the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. Ruprecht Fadem argues that literary texts address this tension through spectral, bordered metaphors and juxtapositions of the ancient and the contemporary.Introduction 1. Au contraire : The Spectral Borderlands of Northern Irish Literature 2. Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin's Other at the Edge of Life 3. Outlining Silence in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian 4. Specter and Doubt in Anna Burns' No Bones

One of the strongest things about this book is the analysis of drama, poetry and fiction in one space. & the text as a whole creates a successful scholarly project, unpacking the dramatic, poetic and fictional texts with critical skill. (Miriam Mara, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 25 (4), August, 2017) 

For readers and teachers less familiar with the politics and history of Northern Ireland, it offers context and overview from partition to the start of the Troubles, the Peace process, and the continuing fractures and tensions within Northern Irish communities. & it offers in-depth studies of three current Northern Irish women writers who have found new ways to articulate the challenges of representation that Heaney recognized. (Michele Holmgren, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 47 (1-2), January-April, 2016)

This volume is unique in that it examines Northern Ireland (rather that the Republic of Ireland), and its argument is organized around three principal writers, all of them women. & The study is well researched and carefully developed. & Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. (D. W. Madden, Choice, September, 2015)