Blurring the Lines : Irish Mythology and Symbolism in Nora Roberts’ The Cousin O’Dwyer’s Trilogy'
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Irish lore weaves through Nora Roberts’ romances as a gilded emerald thread, connecting the 200+ books in her oeuvre. Yet, not many analyses of the subject has been written as the field of popular romance studies is new and much territory lies still uncharted. While many of Roberts’ books use Irish mythology and lore to enrich their plots, none of them incorporate the aspect as much as The Cousin O’Dwyer’s Trilogy. Set in contemporary Ireland, the books connect the ancient with the modern. Rich in celtic symbolism and mythology, the stories go beyond Roberts’ usual magick. In Cousins O’Dwyers, Roberts takes the familiar witchery readers come to expect from her other trilogies like The Three Sisters Island or The Circle Series, and builds upon this world, creating stories in which the boundaries between past, present and future, as wellas human and animal, are blurred or almost erased. Building upon an argument from Christina Valeo’s ‘The Power of Three: Nora Roberts and Serial Magic’, this paper aims to analyze Roberts’ use of Irish mythology and symbolism to enhance reader’s experience as well as on the way Roberts fuses the mythological with the conventional to create a narrative which despite its magical elements still speaks to contemporary readers. |
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