The idea for this thesis first came to light while teaching my first year students the novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I was asked why they had to read the novel when a film had already been made. In today‘s fast-paced ...

This essay discusses the nature of postcolonial versions of Irishness and deconstructs the Manichean categories of selfhood and alterity which feature in both colonial and postcolonial discourse. Using some ideas from ...

Given the dominance of English as the main language of academia (and we acknowledge the political implications of this statement), an accurate pedagogical description of it is important for those of us who are attempting ...

‘Fishing the Sloe-Black River’, the title story of McCann’s first published collection, appeared in print a year before the complete volume of stories was published by Phoenix House. The quasi-magic realist narrative was ...

This essay examines the problematics of language and identity. Beginning with a deconstructive reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Broagh’, it moves on to deconstruct the signifier of Ulster, showing how the use of this term, ...

I would begin this chapter with two pieces of narrative: one from fantasy literature and one from recent political discourse. The fantasy writer Terry Pratchett wrote a book in his Discworld series about religion, gods and ...