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The present essay will explore the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s transnational rendering of the American West in his novel Days without End (2016), emphasizing his representation of neglected western questions and realities and his revision of traditional western tropes and archetypes. Barry’s approach to the American West in Days without End moves beyond the regional and national imagery of this territory, revealing its international and hybrid properties and its multiple and overlapping cultures. It is argued that Barry’s recreation of a different reality from the traditional western monomyth of masculinity, individualism, and Anglo-American conquest allows him to challenge classical frontier narratives and to address international and transcultural issues, such as gender fluidity. The novel, whose main protagonist and narrator is a poor, homosexual Irish immigrant, embraces a different West, questioning romanticized versions of the westward expansion and drawing interesting connections between the Irish immigrants in this region and the Native Americans. Overall, Days without End may be viewed as an acute depiction of the transnational dimension of the American West, proving the power of the Western to overcome its traditional formulaic and mythic boundaries and to travel across global spaces.

As Paul Fussell has shown, the First World War was a watershed moment for 20th century British history and culture. While the role of the 36th (Ulster) Division in the Battle of the Somme has become a part of unionist iconography in what is now Northern Ireland, the experience of southern or nationalist Irish soldiers in the war remains underrepresented. Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel, A Long Long Way is one attempt to correct this historical imbalance. This article will examine how Barry represents the relationship between the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising through the eyes of his politically-conflicted protagonist, Willie Dunne. While the novel at first seems to present a common war experience as a means of healing political divisions between Ireland and Britain, this solution ultimately proves untenable. By the end of the novel, Willie’s hybrid English–Irish identity makes him an outcast in both places, even as he increasingly begins to identify with the Irish nationalist cause. Unlike some of Barry’s other novels, A Long Long Way does not present a disillusioned version of the early 20th century Irish nationalism. Instead, Willie sympathizes with the rebels, and Barry ultimately argues for a more inclusive Irish national identity.

Neste artigo discuto a questão do exílio no romance On Canaan’s Side (2011), tecendo considerações sobre o sujeito diaspórico desenvolvidas por Silviano Santiago (1978), Homi Bhabha (1995) e Edward Said (2003). O romance é uma autobiografia de uma personagem de ficção, cuja história pessoal se entrelaça a episódios traumáticos da história da Irlanda e dos Estados Unidos, país em que a protagonista vive exilada desde a década de 1920. A meu ver, a prática historiográfica nomeada micro-história (Ginzburg; 2006) assemelha-se ao tipo de história que Sebastian Barry escolhe contar, bem como a escrita da história como um discurso sobre o ausente (Certeau; 2011), usada alegoricamente pelo autor no romance.

This paper addresses two groups of novels by Sebastian Barry and discusses his treatment of characters who have been marginalized by the dominant Irish historical narrative, based on the stories of members of his own family and argues that Barry's aim is not to produce a revisionist account of Irish history or justify minority positions. It is rather to present the plight of often isolated individuals and to reveal the complexity of the situations in which they find themselves. The paper uses recent theoretical writing on individual and collective memory and the relationship between memory and history.

Critics of contemporary Irish literature note a surprising omnipresence of historical themes in the novels of a country whose present day is so eventful. Such prominent writers like, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe or Sebastian Barry seem to be immersed in Irish twentieth-century history and the national myth. Barry’s theatre plays and novels usually question the official, heroic version of history by focusing on the forgotten and the marginalised: loyalist Catholics, single women, children. The present article analyses two of his novels: The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) and The Secret Scripture (2008), which share some of the characters and are both set in Sligo in the first half of the twentieth century. The present article claims that in the ten years that separates the publication of these novels, Barry’s attitude to history visibly changed. Contrary to the opinion of most critics, Barry’s approach evolved from the uncompromising revisionism of the earlier novel to considerable scepticism about the possibility of objective history and historical truth in the later work. The article also suggests that tracing this process allows the reader to appreciate the writer’s motivation as an attempt to deal with the taboos of the past before embarking on the problems of the present.

(1955– ), Irish playwright, poet and novelist, born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In

[...]events follow on from other events in a seemingly erratic way, but they all converge and add up confirming that although he does not care for independence and makes marginal choices, Eneas is not necessarily evil or anti-Irish. [...]Eneas' doomed existence seems to serve as an illustration of the quotation from the Book of Revelation (20:15) with which the novel opens and closes: \"And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.\" [...]Eneas' life is more than just a succession of wrong decisions that marginalize and victimize him, or of a series of predicaments that leave him physically and morally wounded. [...]Eneas' presence or inscription in Barry's text challenges his absence or his proscription from the book of life.

It’s a chilly afternoon in the tiny hamlet of Moyne, an hour and a half outside of Dublin, and Irish writer Sebastian Barry is in the converted 19th-century rectory where he’s been living for the past 20 years. “I’m sitting in the place where the rector used to write sermons to castigate his parishioners,” Barry says via Zoom. “And now I’m in here doing these books.”