The Fertility of the Supernatural: Stuart Neville’s ”The Ghosts of Belfast”

• Authors: Jacek Mydla
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In The Ghosts of Belfast (2009), spectres of the conflict’s victims haunt Gerry Fegan, a former “soldier” and assassin. Picking up the metaphorical cue from the epigraph to Neville’s novel – “the place that lacks its ghosts is a barren place” – the article addresses the thriller’s supernatural content. The meaning and role of the titular ghosts have been in part determined by Neville’s debt to the Western traditions of making sense of the supernatural. However, they assume new roles within the narrative and possibly also in the author’s vision of the peace process: i.e. in keeping Northern Ireland “fertile”.

DE

Der Artikel enthält Zusammenfassungen nur in Englisch.

FR

L'article contient uniquement les résumés en anglais.

Keywords

EN

fictional ghosts – supernatural – terrorism – Northern Ireland

DE

FR

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej
• Journal: Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 2

Dates

published

2019

online

2019-07-03

Contributors

author

Jacek Mydla

References

• McCormack, W. J. (2000). (Ed.). Irish Poetry: An Interpretive Anthology from Before Swift to Yeats and After. New York: New York University Press.
• McKinty, A., & Neville, S. (2014). (Ed.). Belfast Noir. New York: Akashic Books.
• Mydla, J. (2017). “Old-Type Hauntings by New Ghosts? Word and Image in the ‘Cybernatural Horror’ Unfriended.” in esse: English Studies in Albania. Journal of the Albanian Association for the Study of English (ASSE), 64-82.
• Neville, S. (2009). The Ghosts of Belfast. New York: Soho Press.

Identifiers

DOI

10.17951/lsmll.2019.43.2.51-59