Afterlives of Violence: Representation of Affect and Memory in Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls and Edurne Portela’s Mejor la Ausencia

Date

2025-4

Author

Mescioglu, Hatice Esra

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This study examines how post-conflict novels imagine new ways of engaging with the past. Focusing on Trespasses (2022) by Louise Kennedy, Factory Girls (2022) by Michelle Gallen, and Mejor la Ausencia (2017) by Edurne Portela, the study explores how narratives written by three women—each of whom grew up during periods of conflict and whose lives were shaped by violence— engage with collective memory and affect in distinctive ways. Rather than portraying the violence in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country merely as armed conflicts between ethnically or religiously divided communities, these novels expose multiple forms of violence. While drawing on the generic conventions and narrative structures of popular fiction produced during times of conflict, these works simultaneously subvert those conventions to propose alternative modes of representation. Trespasses reworks the romance genre—often used to allegorize inter-sectarian reconciliation—by foregrounding shame and imagines alternative modes of reconciliation after the conflict. Factory Girls uses a coming-of-age framework to depict boredom as a pervasive emotional state that reflects the stifling effects of late capitalism and a society shaped by conflict. Mejor la Ausencia uses the bildungsroman genre to illustrate how fear and anger become formative in the socialisation of a generation growing up amid violence. This thesis argues that analysing affect in these novels reveals the complex interplay between the personal and the collective, offering new insights into how these narratives challenge dominant modes of memory and representation. Ultimately, it demonstrates how these novels function as alternative sites of memory through the affective worlds they construct.

Subject Keywords

Northern Irish fiction, Basque fiction, postconflict fiction, literature and memory, affect studies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114511

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis