About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherIrish Academic Press

ISBN-101788551664

ISBN-139781788551663

eBay Product ID (ePID)11057272459

Product Key Features

Number of Pages352 Pages

Publication NameSpiritual Wounds : Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2022

SubjectEurope / Great Britain / General, Europe / Ireland

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaHistory

AuthorSíobhra Aiken

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.2 in

Item Weight21 Oz

Item Length9.2 in

Item Width6.2 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal941.50822

SynopsisSPIRITUAL WOUNDS challenges the widespread belief that the contentious events of the Irish Civil War (1922-23) were covered in a total blanket of silence. The book uncovers an archive of published testimonies by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, written in both English and Irish. Most of the testimonies discussed were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, and nearly all have been overlooked in historical study to date. Revolutionaries went to great lengths to testify to the 'spiritual wounds' of civil war: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. This wealth of published testimony reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries' inability to speak, but rather reflects the unwillingness of official memory makers to listen to the stories of civil war veterans., This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) was followed by a 'traumatic silence.' It achieves this by revealing an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. These testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish, and nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making, demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised, and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans--both men and women--self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to 'heal' the 'spiritual wounds' of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptio

LC Classification NumberDA963