The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899–2016

This bookexplores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shiftingand controversial sons, Roger Casement. Aseminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irishindependence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder ofa sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places:from the imperial horrors of Heart ofDarkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in AlanHollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library(1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play SaintJoan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from thepost-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to thebeguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts,alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialoguesbetween modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positionsCasement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrainof Anglo-Irish history.