<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<records>
<record>
    <language>eng</language>
        <publisher>Journal of Irish Studies</publisher>
        <journalTitle>Estudios Irlandeses</journalTitle>
        <eissn>1699-311X</eissn>
            <publicationDate>2026-03-17</publicationDate>
        <volume>21</volume>
    <issue>21</issue>
        <startPage>71</startPage>
    <endPage>82</endPage>
    <publisherRecordId>14032</publisherRecordId>
    <documentType>article</documentType>
    <title language="eng"><![CDATA[ Echoes of the Past: Memory and Space in William Trevor’s “The News from Ireland” ]]></title>

    <authors>
     
      <author>
        <name><![CDATA[ Camila Franco Batista ]]></name>
        <affiliationId>1</affiliationId>
      </author>
        </authors>

    <affiliationsList>
       
      <affiliationName affiliationId="1"><![CDATA[ Federal University of Rondonópolis, Brazilian Association of Irish Studies (ABEI), Brazil  ]]></affiliationName>
        </affiliationsList>

        <abstract language="eng"><![CDATA[ This article argues that William Trevor’s short story “The News from Ireland” (1986) constructs the Anglo-Irish Big House as a Gothic lieu de mémoire where the legacies of the Great Famine (1845-1852) and later conflicts in Northern Ireland are inscribed and contested. Set against the decline of Anglo-Irish authority, the story stages the tension between Protestant landowners and Catholic peasants, showing how silence, rumour, and absence function as modes of cultural memory. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire, Paul Ricoeur’s critique of the abuses of memory, and Aleida Assmann’s typology of individual, social, political and cultural memory, the article demonstrates how different formats of remembrance intersect and clash within the Big House. Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, notably Gayatri Spivak’s question of the subaltern and Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the “coloniality of power”, further illuminate the epistemic violence that silences Irish Catholic voices. Particular attention is paid to Trevor’s reworking of Gothic tropes – haunting atmospheres, spectral presences, and uncanny figures – as an aesthetic technology that refracts Famine trauma and its afterlives in cultural imagination. By situating the story within both the Irish Big House tradition and postcolonial Gothic discourse, the article demonstrates how Trevor’s narrative destabilizes colonial authority and reimagines the Big House as a Gothic lieu de mémoire, a haunted site where the unspeakable violence of the colonial past returns to unsettle the present.
 ]]></abstract>
    
    <fullTextUrl format="pdf">https://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/FrancoBastista_2026.pdf</fullTextUrl>
    
          <keywords language="eng">
              <keyword>William Trevor</keyword>
              <keyword>The Great Famine</keyword>
              <keyword>Irish Gothic</keyword>
              <keyword>cultural memory</keyword>
              <keyword>postcolonial theory</keyword>
            </keywords>
      </record>
</records>