Reverberations of Trauma: The Great War Revisited through Irish Women's Fiction

Abstract

The participation of Irish soldiers and volunteers in the First World War under the British flag at the height of Irish nationalism has been considered as a shameful and traumatic event, and thus it has been politically, socially and culturally repressed, resulting in a historical amnesia that diametrically affected the identity of the Irish. This fact accounts for a sustained lack of an Irish canon of war literature, as well as of in-depth studies on the topic. This thesis aims to contribute to the reassessment of Ireland's involvement in the war by analyzing historical fiction written by women and published during the war’s centennial, while simultaneously exploring the strategies that literature employs to represent what remains repressed for being an inconvenient truth that conflicts with the official discourse.