Abstract
Bohane is a dystopian city of the future populated by residents who want to ‘reach again for the whimsical days of their youth and for the city as it was back then’ (Barry City of Bohane, 2012, 178) before the ‘lost time’. This chapter will discuss how the past haunts the Bohane urban space, sha** its present and determining its future. Reminiscent of the Celtic Tiger and subsequent economic collapse, Bohane moves easily between dystopia and utopia for the traumatised residents. Never mentioning the trauma of the ‘lost time’ the residents in Bohane have created a new space for memory and nostalgia, their gothic and postmodern present.
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Notes
- 1.
Between 1871 and 1961, the average annual net emigration from Ireland consistently exceeded the natural increase in the Irish population, which shrank from about 4.4 million in 1861 to 2.8 million in 1961. See Ruhs and Quinn for more detailed figures.
- 2.
For a discussion of the influence and the importance of the famine and history to Irish Literature Read Siobhan Kilfeather, 2006, ‘The Gothic Novel.’ The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Ed. John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 79–96, or Derek Hand, 2011, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 3.
A resident of the Northside Rises.
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Flynn, D. (2021). ‘Our Native Reminiscence’: Clinging to ‘Lost Time’ in Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane. In: Evans, AM., Kramer, K. (eds) Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination . Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8_15
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