Construction and deconstruction of national identity in contemporary Irish novels (Robert McLiam Wilson «Eureka street», Seamus Deane «Reading in the dark»)

The article focuses on the creation of national identity in the contemporary Irish novels «Reading in the Dark» by Seamus Deane and «Eureka Street» by Robert McLiam Wilson. In as much as public and historical are the main themes of these novels, a systematic method based on the results of discourse analysis of public and private speech is implemented. This analysis prioritizes selecting the most significant content and linguistic categories describing national identity in speech of public leaders and individuals at the crucial historic moment, particularly 2000, when Austria joined the European Union. The categories selected by R. Wodak and a group of Austrian researchers were applied to give a systematic description of the ways of creating national identity in the novels concerned. The novels belong to the Troubles fiction set in Derry and Belfast - loci mostly associated with the Troubles.