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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.56 pp.79-92
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2018.56.79

Outpost and Outlier: The Ireland of Three Recent Irish Fictions

John Cussen
Professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

In this essay, I read three recent Irish fictions by writers sensitive toIreland’s perennially fraught position as both outlier and outpost of European andBritish cultural, as well as political domains: Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs,Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree, and Sebastian Barry’s The TemporaryGentleman. In The Little Red Chairs, to begin, O’Brien seizes contemporary Ireland’soutpost-of-Europe realities to invent a counter-intuitively plausible plot in which herfictional stand-in for one of the most notorious outlaws of recent European history—Radovan Karadžić, the Butcher of Bosnia—hides for a time in Ireland’sback-of-beyond Connacht province, and does relatively well there. In Baker’s ACountry Road, a Tree, on the other hand, it is Europe that gives shelter of a sort toa fugitive Irish citizen. I say of a sort because in order to take that shelter, thenovel’s cultural fugitive—dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett—chooses perilously,if not absurdly, to remain in France during World War II. Finally, the fictionalmemoir that is the text of The Temporary Gentleman, Barry’s “West Brit” fiction ofthe postcolonial Irish mid-century, reminds us that the call to be Irish is rarelyanswered exclusively. No, these two other calls also make some claim on the Irishperson: the calls to be European and to be English.

변방과 국외자: 최근에 간행된 3편의 아일랜드 소설 속의 아일랜드

존 커슨
펜실베이니아 에딘버러 대학교의 교수

초록

본 논문은 정치적으로나 문화적으로 영국과 유럽의 변방에 있는 국외자적 지위에 항시 민감한 작가 3명의 소설을 탐구한다. 에드나 오브라이언의
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