Autobiography and Memoir in Modern Ireland

Abstract

Autobiography and memoir have been remarkably prolific and popular forms of writing in modern Ireland. For many authors, the subjective account of an individual life is frequently and inseparably entwined with the troubled life of the nation. Frequently in Irish autobiography, the unfinished business of a writer’s life is coterminous with an uncertain political future, so that notions of identity, for both self and nation, take on a curiously suspended form. In recent autobiographical writing, especially since the 1990s, the intense relationship between the psychology of the self and the politics of nationhood has been rendered through a powerful and experimental preoccupation with place and time in narrative. The essay looks at a number of contemporary Irish autobiographical works, including Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), John Walsh’s Falling Angels (1999) and John McGahern’s Memoir (2005), and it considers the ways in which new modes of narrative have been fashioned to serve the difficult and often painful processes of understanding identity in a nation still haunted by its traumatic political past.