• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.473-493
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• 2011

This paper aims, first, to trace the trajectory of Sebastian Barry's dramatic works in terms of retrieving the hidden (hi)stories of his family members, and second, to analyze his most successful play to date in both critical and commercial senses, The Steward of Christendom, in terms of the tension or even rupture between Irish national history and the dramatic representation of it. If contemporary Irish drama as a whole can be seen as an act of mirroring up to nation, Barry's is a refracting than reflecting act. Whereas modern Irish drama tends to have helped, however inadvertently, consolidate the nation-state by imagining Ireland through its other (either in the form of the British empire or the Protestant Unionist north), Barry's drama aims at cracking the surface homogeneity of Irish identity by re-imagining "ourselves" (a forgotten part of which is a community of southern Catholic loyalists). Furthermore, the "ourselves" re-imagined in Barry's drama is more fractured than unified, irreducible in its multiplicity than acquiescent in its singularity. The playwright's foremost concern is to retrieve the lives of "history's leftovers, men and women defeated and discarded by their times" and re-member those men and women who have been expunged from the imagined community of the Irish nation. This he does by endowing "every life" with "an after-life" and "every demon" with "a fairy tale." The Steward of Christendom is Barry's dramatic attempt to bestow upon the historically demonized Thomas Dunne, an Irish policeman in the British Empire, his fairy-tale redemption.