BOOK NEWS: How writers contributed to peace in Northern Ireland

Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland

BY MARILYNN RICHTARIK

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192886408

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/getting-to-good-friday-9780192886408?cc=us&lang=en&#

Getting to Good Friday intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland's divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on decades of reading, researching, and teaching Northern Irish literature and talking and corresponding with Northern Irish writers, Marilynn Richtarik describes literary reactions and contributions to the peace process during the fifteen years preceding the Agreement and in the immediate post-conflict era. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators' ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, "In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across." 

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Interpreting selected literary works by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature-that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to "say" about a given subject-can enrich readers' historical understanding. Through Richtarik's engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself.

• Enhances our understanding of what the peace process achieved and how literary writers contributed to it
• Employs an innovative interdisciplinary approach that smoothly integrates literary analysis and narrative history to illuminate historical phenomena
• Includes analysis informed by the author's personal conversations and correspondence with literary writers, as well as by examination of their unpublished papers
• Offers readers cutting-edge scholarship in a readable format

"Professor Richtarik's book applies her deep knowledge of the psychological and political terrain of Northern Ireland to this empathetic study of a cohort of remarkably talented and closely linked writers. It brings new and arresting insights to the troubled history of the province, its contested cultural paradigms, the pressures which led to the peace process, and the tensions which continue to threaten that achievement." -- R. F. Foster, emeritus professor of Irish History, University of Oxford, and emeritus professor of Irish History and Literature, Queen Mary University of London

"Getting to Good Friday, a profound meditation on historical and political events and the cultural response of writers, confirms that it is by writing that a refinement in character is possible—and that the best self is the self that writes. In Reading in the Dark, published two years before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, Seamus Deane presciently identified the problem of the aftermath: the problem of telling or not telling. Marilynn Richtarik describes the drive towards Good Friday through riveting storytelling, but her detailed attention to creative writers' texts is her finest achievement." -- Anne Devlin, author of After Easter and The Apparitions

"Getting to Good Friday is an important book at a critical time. In arguments about Brexit and the protocol it is sometimes remarked that the people who defend the 1998 agreement never read it ... Getting to Good Friday is a welcome bridge between these sundered generations, made of the words that join them, conditional as they are." -- Nicolas Allen, The Irish Times

Marilynn Richtarik is professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches British, Irish, and world literature. She was educated at Harvard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in American History and Literature, and at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Her previous books include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (2012), and an edition of Stewart Parker's novel Hopdance (2017). She spent the first half of 2017 researching and teaching at Queen's University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar.