The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016

Kirjan The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016 (2023) on kirjoittanut Alison Garden. Kirjan kieli on englanti, ja sen on kustantanut LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS. Kirja on laajuudeltaan 248 sivua ja se on nidottu.

This book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.