Memory and identity in the novels of Jennifer Johnston

This work explores the novels of Jennifer Johnston, an Irish novelist whose writing career began in the early 1970’s and has published her fifteenth book in 2007. Johnston has grown increasingly popular with the Irish reading public, but has received very little attention from American public or scholarly audiences. One dissertation on Johnston has been written previously, in the mid 1990’s. This work seeks to introduce Johnston first through a survey of her critical reception, based on reviews of her novels appearing in a variety of periodicals. The work’s focus is on Johnston’s use of characters’ memory in creating plot structure and narration. Various theories of memory, from psychology and literary studies, and theories of trauma inform interpretations of Johnston’s creative moves. Most important are the relationships her novels strike between narration and time. Characters’ memories, positive or negative, desired or unwanted, dictate the progress of many of Johnston’s novels. One chapter deals specifically with those characters who are traumatized by events in their pasts and, through memory return to those events or find those events intruding upon their existences in the novels’ present moments. Another chapter focuses on characters who suffer due to present circumstances and use the past as a retreat from unfavorable conditions. Also examined, in a separate chapter, are the materials found throughout Johnston’s novels that aid or prompt memory. The work’s final chapter discusses the many Johnston characters who try to write or are writers. This chapter argues that those figures participate in Johnston’s interest in memory because they write in order to be remembered in the future. The work, as an introduction to Jennifer Johnston, identifies the writer’s most prevalent literary patterns in its discussion of memory, and analyzes these as they develop and take shape throughout her corpus