RT Book, Section
T1 Systemic Crime and Social Disaffection in Benjamin Black's Quirke Series: A Struggle for Difference
A1 Pérez Vides, María Auxiliadora
AB Under the pen name of Benjamin Black, the acclaimed Irish writer John Banville haspublished seven crime fiction novels, known as ‘the Quirke series’, set against the backdrop of 1950s Dublin and featuring Quirke, a middle- aged pathologist who works at the Holy Family Hospital. Taken together, the books tackle some of the crimes that stemmed from the strict religious repression prevalent in mid- twentieth- century Ireland, like illegal adoption (Christine Falls and Even the Dead), sexual exploitation and drug dealing (The Silver Swan), incest (Elegy for April), paedophilia (A Death in Summer) or clerical abuse (Holy Orders). It is my contention in this chapter that the existence of systemic crime is suggested along the series, as the stories portray the interconnection of the different agents of hegemonic power that controlled the social order of Ireland’s capital city. Similarly, I will attempt to demonstrate that Black’s narrative articulation of atrocities that had been absent from public discourse for a long time reveals his critique of the transhistorical indifference to socio- structural victimization that has dominated the Irish milieu. Thus, these crime novels, whose publication coincides with the wave of academic studies, survivor memoirs and artistic productions that have made public some of the hidden intricacies of that era in the island, can be said to demand urgent action over the ongoing effects of such ethos of dominance, as accountability has not been sufficiently purged in the present yet.
PB Peter Lang
SN 978-1-80079-728-4
YR 2022
FD 2022-07-25
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/24255
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/24255
LA eng
NO Pérez-Vides, Auxiliadora. "Systemic Crime and Social Disaffection in Benjamin Black's Quirke Series: A Struggle for Difference". In Aida Rosende-Pérez and Rubén Jarazo-Álvarez, eds. The Cultural Politics of In/Difference: Irish Texts and Contexts. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022, 11-28.
NO “Bodies in Transit 2: Genders, Mobilities and Interdependences” (Ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-420 1-P)
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 31 may 2026