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Tara Harney-Mahajan Sebastian Barry's works are preoccupied with reviving the lost, or deeply unpopular, stories of marginalized figures embedded in Irish history. "History," in this particular sense, comprises the commonly received understanding of the outcome of past, often traumatic, events; Barry resurrects marginalized figures from the past to underscore that there seems to be no place for their stories in the present. Indeed, Fintan O'Toole notes that Barry returns again and again to "history's leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times . . . misfits, anomalies, outlanders," yet these characters all seem to possess "an amazing grace."1 The entangled concepts of memory and history are figure prominently in many of Barry's novels and plays. In his first novel, The Engine of Owl-Light (1987) memory is, as one critic notes, "the pervasive and the most vital theme in the novel."2 In Barry's 1995 play The Steward of Christendom, set in 1932, Thomas Dunne lives his final years in an asylum, put there by his daughters; he is increasingly unable to discern between the past and present. For Thomas, his madness is defined by his inability to keep his memories at bay. Thomas's memories incessantly recur in
New Hibernia Review – Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas
Published: Jul 18, 2012
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