Modelling Rural and Urban Place in Post-Ceasefire and Post-Agreement Northern Irish Narrative Fiction

This study is concerned with the cultural agency of literary texts in mapping and re-mapping real-life Northern Irish socio-spatial relations. Taking the Gothic portrayal of Belfast in Troubles fiction as a starting point, the analyses aim to ascertain how models of representing urban and rural place in post-conflict Northern Irish fiction reflect on, and, at the same time, shape the matrix of Northern Ireland as a society undergoing a period of transition. A central argument is that the rural, as an essential element in the Irish literary tradition and repository of Irish nationalist ideals, still plays a significant, though often veiled role, in post-conflict fiction, which is predominantly characterised by a postmodern style of writing and a turn to urban settings. A combined approach of spatial literary studies and literary model theory forms the methodological framework for the analyses of two novels from the time period directly after the 1994 ceasefire, namely Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996) and Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness (1996) and two novels from the period after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, namely Anna Burns’ No Bones (2001) and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2008).