Prashant Maurya and Nagendra Kumar
Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 28, Issue 3, September 2020
Keywords: Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Catholics, Ireland, J. G. Farrell, othering, Protestants
Published on: 25 September 2020
The present article examines the longstanding strife between the Irish Catholics and Anglo- Irish Protestants through James Gordon Farrell’s historical novel, Troubles (1970). By focusing on the character of Edward; a representative of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the novel, this study argues that the representation of the native Irish Catholics suffers from “othering”. The study relies on the concepts formulated and explicated by postcolonial critics like Fanon, Said and Spivak in their critical works as its theoretical premise. The article first traces the epistemological creation of the native Catholic Irish as the “other” by the British and secondly; it investigates its role in grooming Edward’s ideology of othering the natives. Further, the paper argues that Edward’s position regarding the “other” is not sudden; instead, it is an outcome of the long tradition of the British colonial fallacy about the native Gaelic-Irish.
ISSN 0128-7702
e-ISSN 2231-8534
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