🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£21.40
RRP: £24.99
Save £3.59 (14%)
Dispatched within 2-3 working days.

The Politics of Memoir and the Northern Ireland Conflict

By (author) Stephen Hopkins
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Published: 1st Mar 2017
Dimensions: w 149mm h 232mm d 24mm
Weight: 425g
ISBN-10: 1786940140
ISBN-13: 9781786940148
Barcode No: 9781786940148
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
This book examines memoir-writing by many of the key political actors in the Northern Irish 'Troubles' (1969-1998), and argues that memoir has been a neglected dimension of the study of the legacies of the violent conflict. It investigates these sources in the context of ongoing disputes over how to interpret Northern Ireland's recent past. A careful reading of these memoirs can provide insights into the lived experience and retrospective judgments of some of the main protagonists of the conflict. The period of relative peace rests upon an uneasy calm in Northern Ireland. Many people continue to inhabit contested ideological territories, and in their strategies for shaping the narrative 'telling' of the conflict, key individuals within the Protestant Unionist and Catholic Irish Nationalist communities can appear locked into exclusive and self-justifying discourses. In such circumstances, while some memoirists have been genuinely self-critical, many others have utilised a post-conflict language of societal reconciliation in order to mask a strategy that actually seeks to score rhetorical victories and to discomfort traditional enemies. Memoir-writing is only one dimension of the current ad hoc approach to 'dealing with the past' in Northern Ireland, but in the absence of any consensus regarding an overarching 'truth and reconciliation' process, this is likely to be the pattern for the foreseeable future. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of a major resource for understanding the conflict.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New£21.40
+ FREE UK P & P

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
Reviews
'Written in a clear, uncluttered style, this is an important work that provides the first comprehensive analysis of the importance of memoir in understanding the conflict in Northern Ireland.'

Henry Patterson, University of Ulster 'A short yet comprehensive account of Troubles-related memoir that can benefit anyone who wants to read about Northern Ireland's recent history.'

Malachi O'Doherty, The Irish Times