Birte Heidemann

This book uncovers a new genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’, consisting of a body of texts – fiction, poetry and drama – by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. In an attempt to demarcate the literary-aesthetic parameters of the genre, the book proposes a selective revision of postcolonial theories on ‘liminality’ through a subset of concepts such as ‘negative liminality’, ‘liminal suspension’ and ‘liminal permanence.’ These conceptual interventions, as the readings demonstrate, help articulate how the Agreement’s rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign towards a ‘progressive’ future breed new forms of violence that produce liminally suspended subject positions.

Lost in a Liminal Space?

Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature

Ines Detmers

This essay collection embarks on a historical voyage into the idea of the West, while contextualising its relevance to the contemporary discourses on cultural difference. Although the idea of the West predates both colonial and Orientalist projects, it has been radically reshaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. In the wake of these developments, this collection attends to the nebulous paradigm shifts that account for a reconfiguration of the conventional coordinates of the West (West vs. Rest, Orient vs. Occident). The essays featured in this collection draw upon a wide range of theories from a comparative perspective. Taken together, the collection covers a vast terrain of textual and non-textual sources, including novels, political and poetological programs, video-clips and hypertexts, while exploring the formal-aesthetic representations of the West from interdisciplinary perspectives as diverse as German classicism, (post-)modern Britain, Canada, China, Ireland and the postcolonial world.

Birte Heidemann

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