A Map of Things Known and Lost in Anne Enright’s The Green Road
- 1 University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
ISSN: 1699-311X
Year of publication: 2016
Issue: 11
Pages: 44-55
Type: Article
More publications in: Estudios irlandeses = Journal of Irish Studies
Sustainable development goals
Abstract
The present contribution interprets Anne Enright’s most recent novel, The Green Road (2015), as the story of two decades of an Irish family that is used by the writer to offer an alternative fictional rendering of the history of Ireland and the Irish from the 1980s till the early twenty-first century, as well as, formally speaking, a further contribution to the Irish writers’ penchant for destabilizing the conventions of a literary genre too frequently associated with British settlement and stability (Eagleton 1995) and with nineteenth-century realism (Hand 2011); and, therefore, recurrently considered as unable to apprehend the disruptive and multifaceted condition of Ireland and the Irish. Enright goes from the particular to the universal: the story of the Madigans serves to cover the recent history of Ireland as well as to deal with concerns such as motherhood, religion, sex, aging depression, illness, materialism and migrations, among others. Formally speaking, Enright’s latest novel is undoubtedly the most daring and innovative text in her already vast literary output and can and should be interpreted as the author’s most remarkable contribution to a literary genre with which Irish writers have not ceased to experiment.
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