英文摘要 |
Ireland in the 1960s underwent a pivotal transformation of national ethos, from conservative nationalism to modernization which coincided with anti-nationalist revisionism. Written in the early 1990s when Ireland enjoyed its Celtic Tiger economic miracle, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy looks back at this transitional period to re-assess the waning nationalism and to investigate the throes concomitant with the onset of modernization. The novel's critique of Irish nationalism has often been aligned with the revisionist attempt to debunk the nationalist meta-narrative. This revisionist reading of the novel, however, fails to account for the novel's ambivalence toward Ireland's modernizing project. This essay, drawing from the novel's Gothic influence, intends to complicate and supplement the often simplistic revisionist approach to the novel. Foregrounding the concept of Gothic antiquarianism, this essay argues that while The Butcher Boy is critical of conservative nationalism, it also sounds a cautious note to Ireland's relentless modernization which registers a peculiar horror. |