Karam Nayebpour, Naghmeh Varghaiyan

The past is an ever-flowing and never-dying river in human consciousness. Any single piece of our memories is a constituent part of this river. By our remembering acts, we continuously and intermittently become connected to our stream of consciousness. Therefore, remembering is an integrated part of our mind. Similarly, it is a salient property of fictional minds, too. The past is a defining element for the characters’ sense of identity in narrative fiction. This is the case in the three narratives analysed in the present book. The Sea (2005) by John Banville, The Gathering (2007) by Anne Enright, and Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns are post-millennial Irish narratives in which remembrance of the things past is indexed to the first-person narrators’ sense of identity. In its three parts and by drawing on the theories of memory and remembering, this book explores how the storytellers’ acts of recollecting, retrieving, recalling, as well as retelling eventful episodes from the past bring about constructive emotional and cognitive outputs for them.

Naghmeh Varghaiyan is lecturer of English Language and Literature at Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, Türkiye. Her main research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first-century English Literature. Varghaiyan’s work has appeared in various peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

Karam Nayebpour is professor of English Literature at Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, Türkiye. His research interests are Narratology and English Literature. Nayebpour is a member of the European Narratology Network (ENN).