Date

2022-5-25

Author

Tanrıöveri, Halilcan

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The experience of the socially- and politically-marginalized in Ireland during the anti-colonial struggle against Britain and its aftermath emerges as a major concern in Sebastian Barry's works of fiction. This entails an ongoing exploration in his work of the question of the national identity of “Irishness,” religious and political identities such as being Protestant, Catholic, Unionist or Republican. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the scholarship on Barry’s fiction, particularly, the research on his postcolonial approach to and concern with the treatment and representation of the socially- and politically-marginalized in Irish history in On Canaan's Side (2011) and The Secret Scripture (2008). Both novels feature outcast women narrators who retrospectively give an account of their lives against the background of Irish history, particularly during Ireland’s anti-colonial nation-building process in the first half of the twentieth century. It will be argued that in these novels Barry adopts a postcolonial and feminist approach to the anti-colonial nationalist era of Irish history and displays a critical attitude toward nationalist history-writing and homogenizing nationalist practices in Ireland by offering an alternative reading of anti-colonial nationalist history through individual historiographies/“petit narratives” written by socially-marginalized female characters.

Subject Keywords

Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture, On Canaan's Side, Irish women and nationalism, postcolonialism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/97318

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis