Challenging Heroic Narratives: Emotions and Marginalisation in Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way and Lia Mills’s Fallen

This chapter argues that contemporary Irish fiction reconfigures the cultural memory of the 1916 Easter Rising by challenging its consolatory heroic myths and foregrounding marginalised lives. Focusing on Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005) and Lia Mills’s Fallen (2014), it first traces how early narratives, from Patrick Pearse’s sacrificial rhetoric to W. B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916”, elevated a small group of male, Catholic rebels into foundational martyrs of the nation while obscuring women’s militancy, non‑Catholic participants, civilian casualties, and the experiences of over 200,000 Irishmen who served in the British Army during the Great War. It then shows how Barry and Mills, in dialogue with revisionist historiography and recent commemorative practices, relocate the Rising within the broader context of World War I, using the micro‑histories and affective perspectives of an Irish soldier, Willie Dunne, and a grieving history graduate, Katie Crilly, to expose the emotional costs of selective remembrance, including shame, anger, and a profound sense of betrayal. By focalising events through these “leftover” figures, the novels reveal the ideological work of official narratives, dramatise the tension between private grief and public commemoration, and stage fiction’s capacity to retrieve “obscured histories” and contest state‑sanctioned nostalgia. The chapter concludes by reading these texts alongside the Irish Decade of Centenaries (2012–2023) and initiatives such as the cross‑border “One Book Two Cities” selection of Fallen, arguing that literature remains crucial to ongoing debates about whose stories enter the canon of national memory and how future commemorations might reimagine more inclusive narratives of Ireland’s revolutionary past.