Border Gothic - history, violence and the border in the writings of Eugene McCabe

Abstract

As well as producing a rich body of novels, novellas, short-stories and plays spanning throughout seventy years of the century of partition, Eugene McCabe charts the broad trajectory of Irish history and politics from the Elizabethan Conquest and Ulster Plantation of the 16th and 17th centuries to the recent 'Troubles' which spanned the thirty years between the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement (1968) and the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998). They positively seethe with gruesome assassinations, indiscriminate bombings and deliberate shootings, while resonating with a veritable cacophony of deep-seeded ethnic rivalries and genocidal, religious hatreds, which are interlaced with poverty, social deprivation and dis-function, migration and emigration.