Introduction

Abstract

Modern literature is by its very nature intertextual. Roland Barthes’s proposition that ‘any text is a new tissue of past citations’² defines each creative act as an imitation or translation of earlier creative acts, a recasting of existing narratives, motifs and discourses into ‘new’ configurations. Intertextuality plays a particularly significant role within contemporary Irish writing, much of which reflects the struggle by both individuals and collectives to come to terms with a history which once appeared to offer a secure source of cultural definition, but which is now open to radical contestation. As the novelist Joseph O’Connor recently put it: ‘We can take nothing for granted now. We thought the text of our Irishness was set in stone but it turned out to be carved in ice, and it’s melting fast.’³ Thirty years of intercommunal violence in Northern Ireland, paralleled by a period of rapid and far-reaching social and cultural change in the Republic, has deeply marked Ireland’s literary texts and compelled writers from all traditions not only to question inherited pieties and verities, but also the authority and efficacy of art itself. In their uncertainty about how to respond to these unstable and disruptive socio-political narratives, writers have continually engaged in cross-and inter-generational discursive dialogues with other writers, carrying on a process of textual imitation, modification and subversion.

If every fully realized story […] is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats.¹

Hayden White