Chapter 7 - Crossings: Northern Irish Literature from Good Friday to Brexit

Summary

Taking inspiration from Edna Longley’s notion of the ‘cultural corridor’, this chapter emphasises Post-Agreement literature’s commitment to Northern Ireland as a place of interchange that enables and envisages various crossings. Rather than accepting the ‘post’ as a temporal marker that designates a distinct break with what came before, it contends that contemporary Northern writing raises awareness of what remains to be worked through and addressed. If critics have suggested that literature from Northern Ireland reflects its ongoing political state of liminal suspension, this chapter seeks to recover the recalcitrant dynamics of literary liminality as a crosscurrent to the homogenising and teleological thrust of the progress narratives underpinning both the Agreement and Brexit. This emphasis on the active energies suggested by the motif of crosscurrents allows a revision of the more passive concepts of the cultural corridor and suspension and foregrounds the potential of contemporary Northern Irish literature to establish new affiliations and reconciliatory discussions.