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