The Battles We Refuse to Fight Today Become the Hardships Our Children Must Endure Tomorrow: The Ethno-political Conflict and Its Legacy in Selected Contemporary Northern Irish Novels for Children and YA

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F46747885%3A24510%2F23%3A00012044" target="_blank" >RIV/46747885:24510/23:00012044 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/book/10.14220/9783737016575" target="_blank" >https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/book/10.14220/9783737016575</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.14220/9783737016575" target="_blank" >10.14220/9783737016575</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Battles We Refuse to Fight Today Become the Hardships Our Children Must Endure Tomorrow: The Ethno-political Conflict and Its Legacy in Selected Contemporary Northern Irish Novels for Children and YA

Original language description

This chapter proceeds contributes to the discussion of politics and poetics of narrative of conflict resolution in selected contemporary texts which deal with the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Garrett Carr’s Badness of Ballydog (2010), and Lost Dogs (2010), together with Sue Divin’s debut novel Guard Your Heart (2020). The texts are assessed as what Maria Pia Lara has called “reflective judgements”, examples of just literature that questions morality after the end of a/the conflict, including responsibility to rebuild. Along these lines the chapter argues that even if the texts might not seem to have achieved an actual change of the status quo, their import is more than aesthetic. The texts put forward, however implicitly or indirectly at times, the claim that transformation requires transition “from a concern with the resolution of issues […] toward a frame of reference that focuses on the restoration and rebuilding of relationships”, which is what, Lederach argues, genuine conflict transformation requires (2004, 24). In fact, one might go as far as to claim that the texts embody and/or argue for the “shift from identities based on resistance and defense to those based on cooperation and reconciliation,” and thus fulfil what Siobhán McEvoy-Levy calls the “positive task of peacebuilding” (2001, 3). The ultimate question the chapter seeks to ponder is: whether these works seek to challenge hegemonic, monologic discourses of othering or monsterisation, whether they champion what could be termed the ethics of the other instead, or whether they actually affirm the aforementioned claim that “an [altogether new] alternative framework to the community relations paradigm” needs to be employed as a strategy “to address both the conflict and the divided nature” of Northern Irish society. There is yet another important aspect related to restorative justice the chapter will attempt to illustrate: the texts embody, that which concerns the roles of children and young people in armed conflict, and the effects of such conflict and its aftermath on their development. This is quite significant since regardless of the growing body of literature dealing with this, not too long ago “neither children nor youth [would] appear as important variables in the literature on peace process” (McEvoy-Levy 2001, 2). However, such neglect is “counterproductive in terms of peace building particularly in the crucial post/accord phase with its twin challenges of violence prevention/accord maintenance and societal reconciliation and reconstruction”, as “youth embody essential elements of both challenges” (2).

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60206 - Specific literatures

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Reimagined Communities: Rewriting Nationalisms in European Literary Discourses

ISBN

978-3-8471-1657-8

Number of pages of the result

18

Pages from-to

119-136

Number of pages of the book

217

Publisher name

V&R Unipress

Place of publication

Göttingen

UT code for WoS chapter

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