The century-long Irish literary engagement with representations of trauma has shifted in response to Irish society’s contemporary political and historical moment. This shift not only reflects the evolving political and social climate after the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent economic austerity, but also a concomitant refocusing on narratives of recovery. Trauma thus becomes not the aim of representation, as it was for much of the twentieth century, but rather a vehicle toward a more promising future. Recent literary narratives of parent-child interaction reflect a move from traumatic to more hopeful forms of representation. By examining the recuperative narrative of the parental body in The Green Road, I suggest that, while the legacy of the traumatized body remains, Irish authors have increasingly made room for the nurturing, connected parental body, too. This trend is symptomatic of the wider movement, away from trauma and toward narratives of recovery, characteristic of the twenty-first century Irish novel.
Professor Costello-Sullivan is a Professor of Modern Irish literature and the former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Le Moyne (2014-2019). She teaches courses in 19th-21st-century English and Irish literature, post-colonial literature, and writing. She began at Le Moyne in 2004, after earning a B.A. in English and Spanish at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English/Irish Studies from Boston College (2004). She is the author of the monographs Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín (Reimaging Ireland series, Peter Lang 2012) and, most recently, of Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-first-Century Irish Novel, (Syracuse UP, March 2018). Kate has also edited two critical editions, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (2013, Syracuse UP) and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! (2016, Anthem Press). Kate is a recent former President of the American Conference for Irish Studies—the largest academic Irish organization in the world—and has served since summer 2018 as the (first female) Series Editor of the Syracuse University Press’s prestigious Irish line, the oldest line of its kind in North America. She is currently researching representations of the nurturing parental body in Irish literature for her next monograph; she has an edited collection on the Irish in America forthcoming (summer 2024) with Routledge (co-edited with Dr. Cian McMahon) and multiple articles pending publication.