‘Things We’d Rather Forget’: Trauma, the Troubles, and Magical Realism in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Women’s Short Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p class="p1">The post-Good Friday/Belfast Agreement period has witnessed an efflorescence of magical realist fiction by Northern Irish women authors. Although these texts were published during an ostensibly ‘post-conflict’ moment, recurrent trauma linked to the Troubles manifests in the form of magical realist narrative elements such as surrealist, fantastic, and phantasmal events and characters. This essay considers the ways in which the magical realist mode is useful to women writers within the context of contemporary Northern Irish culture. The dialectical structure of magical realism makes this mode well-suited to post-Agreement, ‘post-conflict’ literature, which ricochets back and forth across the ‘post-’ marker in order to explore how the past impinges upon the present. This study analyses work by Jan Carson, Bernie McGill, and Roisín O’Donnell, authors whose magical realist texts address the ‘living ghosts’ of the Troubles. Their stories investigate the transgenerational memory of trauma and the ‘legacy’ of the conflict and consider the ways in which these are transmitted. They examine the impact of this transmission on the family unit – particularly upon younger generations – and contemplate the nature of the society that they will inherit. These writers utilise the magical realist mode as a means to challenge received narratives about Northern Ireland and to engage with the memory of trauma, which has been sublimated by the progressivist discourse of the Agreement.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".