Abstract
As one of the most exciting new writers to emerge in Northern Ireland in the 2000s, Jan Carson's work has begun to gather some well-deserved critical attention. A self-declared magical realist, Carson writes of the North in ways that combine the familiar and the fantastical to produce, as Fiona McCann has argued, radically dissensual perspectives (565).
Magical realism's aesthetics of temporal and ontological displacement has long been valued for its political resonances, and these seem particularly well fitted to the disjunctures and contradictions of contemporary Northern Irish experience, as recent work by Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado and Caroline Magennis attests. Taking on board these appreciations of Carson's work, this paper will analyse The Fire Starters (2019), a narrative permeated with violence and acutely observant of corporeal irrealities.
The paper will explore the ways an ecology of violence is rendered in the narrative to argue that Carson's magical realism opens a tantalizing possibility of an ethics of care.