Overview

This book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.

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9781802077926

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Reviews

"'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.' Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York 'As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, ""continue to haunt us"", but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.' Mary McAuliffe, Irish Historical Studies 'Garden writes an admirably nuanced and elaborately and systematically interwoven text […] This study adds much to the fields of memory studies, to gender studies, to the nationalist histories of Ireland and Britain, and to literary studies.' Frances Devlin-Glass, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 'Garden embraces all that is ""complex, contradictory and messy"" in Casement’s legacy: unrestricted by text or canon, she ... demonstrates how the ""queer archival trail"" of Roger Casement continues to disturb neat narratives of history.' Galen D. Bunting, Modernism/Modernity 'This is a courageous, profoundly researched and theoretically challenging work that synthesizes the expanding Queer archive of Casement material and builds on the pioneering work by the American literary historian, Lucy McDiarmid. Garden’s opening chapter on Conrad and Sebald must rank as one of the most stimulating interventions on the ""archival, textual and historical dialogue"" between Heart of Darkness and The Rings of Saturn.' Angus Mitchell, Review of Irish Studies in Europe"

'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.' Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York

Author Information

Alison Garden is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. She was formerly an Irish Research Council Fellow and Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin.

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