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- Title
“the straitjacket of ‘Ulster’”: Brian Moore, Partition, and Fatalism.
- Authors
O’Neill, Stephen
- Abstract
This article interrogates the construction of Brian Moore as a “Northern Irish” writer in the context of the centenary of his birth in 2021, a birth which was frequently conflated with the formation of the northern state in 1921. In critically assessing the received image of Moore in the celebrations surrounding this one hundredth birthday, it draws upon criticism and journalism that has read Moore as an “Ulster” writer, and compares this with the development of the writer’s attitudes towards the six counties as they were expressed in interviews and articles throughout his life. These reflected the fatalism that characterised representations of the northern Catholic minority since the beginning of partition in 1921. Recentering Moore’s expressed upper-middle class background in North Belfast, and in particular his heroization of his uncle—the politician, scholar, and representative of the Irish Boundary Commission Eoin MacNeill—the article argues for the centrality of partition rather than “Northern Ireland” as a context for Moore’s work. This argument is then developed with a close reading of Moore’s early Belfast novels Judith Hearne (1955) and The Feast of Lupercal (1957), which despite an absence of historicalpolitical referents were shaped and conditioned by the ongoing process of partition.
- Subjects
JOURNALISM; HUMAN behavior; PRACTICAL politics; CATHOLICS
- Publication
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2021, Vol 44, Issue 2, p38
- ISSN
0703-1459
- Publication type
Article