Analysis of Collective Trauma of Women in Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2025/ja3p.v1.s1.8Keywords:
Trauma, resilience, traumatic events, women, Donal Ryan.Abstract
This study critically analyses Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island (2022) from the perspective of collective trauma, trauma experience, its destructive effects and the strategies of resilience. It draws on a mixed approach, combining two literary critical theories, that is, Cathy Caruth’s and Michelle Balaev’s trauma theories and Ann Masten’s Resilience theory. It reveals how trauma is represented and experienced in the novel individually and collectively, how trauma affects the characters’ psyches and lives in a destructive way. It also shows the resilience mechanisms developed by the characters to overcome their traumas. The study highlights that in Donal Ryan’s novel The Queen of Dirt Island, four generations of women face pangs of traumatic events which drastically affect their emotional and psychological states but they jointly manage to thrive, which may lead readers of this literary work, especially those victims of terrorism in the Sahel region and in conflict zones worldwide, to avail of the same resilience mechanisms in their handling of their traumas.
References
American psychology association. (2024). Cultural informed trauma and grief recovery. https://www.apa.org.
Balaev, M. (2008). Trends in literary trauma theory. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 41(2),149-166. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029500.
Balaev, M. (2018). Trauma Studies. In D. Richter (Ed.), A Companion to Literary Theory, (pp.360-371). John Wiley & Sons Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118958933
Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma: Exploration in memory. The Johns Hopkins university press.
Beata, P. (2014). History, memory, trauma, in contemporary British and Irish fiction. Kraków Jagiellonian university press.
Bertsia, V., Poulou, M. (2023). Resilience: Theoretical framework and mmplications for school. International Education Studies, 16(2),pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5539/ies.v16n2p1
Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cloete, I. & mlambo, N. (2014). A Literary exploration of trauma and resilience in Tagwira's ‘The Uncertainty of Hope’. Nawa Journal of Language & Communication, 8(2), 92-105. http://hdl.handle.net/10628/550
Cordner, A. (2014). Writing the troubles: Gender and trauma in Northern Ireland. [PhD thesis, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne]. Newcastle University Theses. https://theses.ncl.ac.uk
Eilefson, S. L. (2015). The trauma thesis: Medical and literary representation of psychological trauma in the twentieth century. [dissertation, Loyola University Chicago]. Loyola eCommons. https://ecommons.luc.edu
Ledesma, J. (2014). Conceptual frameworks and research models on resilience in leadership. Sage Open, 4(3), pp. 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/2158244014545464
Liu, H., Zhang, C., Ji, Y., & Yang, L. (2018). Biological and psychological perspectives of resilience: Is it possible to improve stress resistance?. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12(326), pp. 1-12. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00326
Luckhurst, R. (2006). Mixing memory and desire: Psychoanalysis, psychology, and trauma theory. In P. Waugh. (Ed), Literary theory and criticism: an Oxford guide, (pp. 497-507). Oxford University Press. https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/23102
Masten, S. A. (2014). Ordinary magic: Resilience in Development. The Guilford Press. http://www.guilford.com/p/masten
Masten, S. A., Best, K. M., & Garmezy, N. (1991). Resilience and development: Contributions from the study of children who overcome adversity. Development and Psychopathology, 2(199), pp. 425-444. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579400005812
Ryan, D. (2022). The Queen of Dirt Island. Doubleday. https://www.penguin.co.uk
Shoukat, L., Waheed, S., & Arshad, K. (2021). An Analysis of personal and collective Trauma in Khaled Hosseini's novel ‘Sea Player’. Journal of English education, 6(2), pp.117-130. https://doi.org/10.30606/jee
Southwick, S. M., Bonanno, G. A., Masten, S. A., Panter-Brick, C., & Yehuda, R. (2014). Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: Interdisciplinary perspectives. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5(25338), pp.1-14. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338
Van Breda, A. D. (2018). A Critical review of Resilience theory and its relevance for social work. Social Work / Maatskaplikewerk, 54(1), pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.15270/54-1-611
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal Africain de Psychologie et Psychologie Pathologique
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
