| Summary: | This article posits the home as a key site in the Northern Irish conflict and examines the possibilities opened up by the home in Deirdre Madden’s 1996 novel One by One in the Darkness for dealing with the past, developing subjectivity and building solidarity, resilience and resistance. In dealing with these themes, this article will examine how Madden’s text, set in the run-up to the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 and published in 1996 at the tail-end of the conflict, anticipates some of the rhetoric of the Belfast Agreement and the discourse around it, but also how it fills in some of the gaps left by the Agreement and even challenges aspects of it. In thinking about Madden’s intense focus on the home, I draw on the work of Adam Hanna, Daniel Miller, Sara McDowell and Catherine Switzer and Rhona Richman-Kenneally. Madden’s novel is explicitly concerned with memory and representation and I will examine these preoccupations with reference to the theories of memory-studies theorists Guy Beiner, Graham Dawson and Rebecca Graff-McRae. In my final section I will make use of theories of memory, narrative, power and agency put forward by various social and discursive psychologists, drawing particularly on the work of Cristian Tileagă, to examine how the characters use their past experiences to deal with a situation of political and personal turmoil. I argue that Madden offers us a different, more radical and dynamic form of remembering than more conventional, static forms of remembrance in Northern Ireland and suggests the spaces on which we should be turning our attention.
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