John McGahern's Amongst Women: representation, memory, and trauma.(Critical Essay)

Despite the prevailing enthusiastic reception of John McGahern's Amongst Women (1) a certain number of readers detected in the novel's focus upon rural Ireland of the 1950 a reluctance upon his part to engage with contemporary Irish agriculture Part of this reaction no doubt is triggered by the agency of McGahern's signature conservative narrative diction but the chief cause appear to bes to be the retrograde nature of its material, the depiction of a dated rural community restrained and restricted by dint of limited economic possibilities and a dominant Catholic social reality that appears distant from an Ireland of the European