Palimpsest Histories

"Palimpsest histories" work as the scriptures of diverse cultural heritages,deriving infinite annotations and reviews.During post-independent periods in Ireland,history and historical narrative are transformed into homogeneous discourse,and fiction is preempted by the fabulous nature of Irish history.The contemporary Irish novel effaces the original writing of dominant discourse with heterogeneous,diverse and magnanimous traumatic writing.Writers strive to recollect the lost vestiges and search for historical origins from those unrecognized traumatic memories.Current studies,abroad and home,indicate that sparse studies are associated with comprehensive traumatic study of the contemporary Irish novel.Besides,studies of single text primly attach importance to traumatic novel of a certain theme or specific history,neglecting the cross-style and cross-space essence of the contemporary Irish writing.Based on this,concerning works of various literary styles,the thesis attempts to explore the reality of traumatic history among multi-angle traumatic writings in terms of three aspects of trauma-nation,family and individual.The body is divided into four chapters.The first chapter interprets development and shift of traumatic theory and vicissitudes of social historical contexts where novel is created.The following parts,from the perspective of historiographic metafiction,the Gothic writing and literary testimony,analyze the contemporary Irish novel with the.overall thread-traumatic performance,transgenerational transmission and working through.Firstly,with the strategy of polyphony and dialogue,parody and irony,historiographic metafictions critically examine the received nationalist myths of the Great Famine and 1916 rebel heroes.Besides,uncanny and ghost hauntology in the contemporary Gothic writing reflect latency of historical trauma in family,which reveals that the secret of transgenerational transmission lies in the "crypt" of the marginalized communities'mentality.Furthermore,testimony endows victims to regain writing power once deprived of.Through collective mourning,victims endeavor to work through trauma by forming a witness community.The multi-dimensional traumatic writing manifests the zeitgeist of literary creation.