Nostalgia and Post-Crash Irish Identity in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Nostalgia and Post-Crash Irish Identity in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Nostalgia has long been an essential element in Irish culture. What is nostalgia like in contemporary Ireland? Does it fare well in Ireland’s recent change of fortune following the economic crash? What is its function in post-crash Ireland, if any? This article seeks to address these questions through two representative works of fiction published in the post-crash period: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012) and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016). The first section offers an overview of current scholarship on nostalgia, with particular focus on how it may engender a reflection on identity and help people through crisis by fortifying their self-continuity. Another focus is how nostalgia can be generated by the formal devices of a literary text. The second and third sections analyze The Spinning Heart and Solar Bones respectively. I will first delineate the novels’ formal and thematic nostalgia to give a comprehensive view of their nostalgia-scape. This will be followed by analysis of how nostalgia plays a role in the characters’ struggle to make sense of loss and come through crisis. The last section discusses the implications of such a reading for reimagining Irish identity in post-crash Ireland.