This book develops an innovative Irish-Scottish postcolonial approach by galvanizing Emmanuel Levinas' ethics with the socio-cultural category of the 'subaltern'. It sheds new light on contemporary Scottish and Irish fiction, exploring how these writings interact with the recent restructuring of the three state-formations in Ireland and Scotland.

'This book is a brilliantly sustained, rigorous and sophisticated analysis of contemporary Irish and Scottish writing. It is brimming with provocative ideas and stimulating insight. Not only does it stand at the cutting edge of Irish-Scottish Studies, it also galvanises critical theory more widely with verve and distinction.' - Aaron Kelly, University of Edinburgh, UK

'Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature undertakes a uniquely and persuasively rigorous ethico-political reading of post-devolutionary politics and literature in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Its intellectual subtlety challenges the way we understand recent Irish and Scottish texts and the comparisons that are made between them. A genuinely new approach to Irish and Scottish studies.' - Colin Graham, National University of Ireland

'This is a timely book; written at the crossroads of these intersecting histories, the Irish financial collapse makes a poignant backdrop to Lehner's erudite and studiously executed analysis.' - Scottish Literary Review

Autorentext
STEFANIE LEHNER is Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published in the areas of Scottish and Irish studies, including an essay on Northern Irish fiction that won the 2007 BAIS Essay Prize and appeared in the Irish Studies Review .

Inhalt
List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Irish-Scottish Crosscurrents: Towards an Archipelagic Subaltern Aesth Ethics (D)evolutions? Transformations in the Scottish & Irish ImagiNation 'Buried in Silence and Oblivion': Subaltern Counter-Histories in the Scottish-Irish Archipelago James Kelman's 'Naval History' and Robert McLiam Wilson's 'The Dreamed' 'History stands so still, it gathers dust': Mapping Ethical Disjunctures in Contemporary Ireland and Scotland Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and James Kelman's You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free 'Measuring Silences': The Northern Irish Peace Process as Arkhe -Taintment? Glenn Patterson's That Which Was and Eoin McNamee's The Ultras 'Un-Remembering History': Traumatic Herstories in Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors , Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Jennifer Johnston's The Invisible Worm Feminine Futures?: Gender Trouble in the Allegorical ImagiNation Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine and Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto Conclusion Works Cited Index