الفهرس 
PrefaceOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This study falls into three chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is meant to give a brief historical account of Ireland before the partition and the causes that led to the existence of the state of Northern Ireland. It will also provide a thorough background of Northern Ireland’s political and social situation in order to better understand the backDROP against which Bobby Sands was imprisoned and came to write. It is meant as well to survey the genre of political prison writing and show the way it can come under the wider umbrella of Resistance Literature, highlighting its liberating aspects as a literary genre.
Chapter two, through offering a textual analysis of Sands’ prison memoir, One Day in My Life (1998), will endeavour to demonstrate how it subverts the power of both the British government and the prison authorities in Northern Ireland. It will also underline the various acts of resistance that were carried out by Bobby Sands and the other Republican prisoners in the H-Block prison, and show how they accorded them with power and allowed them a central place in their sociopolitical and historical contexts. The whole chapter sets out to foreground the way power, resistance and the body are interrelated in the context of political prison writing. This will be done through offering a Foucauldian reading to the memoir. The chapter aims to prove Sands’ ability to transcend the corporal constraint and to elucidate the means by which he manages to have a voice of his own; hence the title of the chapter. The memoir helps redress Sands’ peripheral position and can be seen as a medium upon which the relations of power in Northern Ireland are made visible.
Hosni vii
Chapter three aims to underscore the way some of Sands’ prison poems act as a site of oppression and resistance. Through offering an in-depth analysis to some of his prison poems and by recourse to Foucault’s paradigm of heterotopia, it will show how the confined space of prison can be seen as a third space where different realities are made manifest. It will also show how Sands attempts to escape the oppressive aspect of his prison heterotopia and manages to formulate his own mythic and empowering space. This chapter also shows the way the bodies of political prisoners can be deemed another heterotopia in the way they can be seen to act as a third space where the relations of power are enacted. The political prisoners’ body acts as salient weapon in the larger political struggle of both the Republican prisoners and the British government. They both prove to make use of it in rendering their views tangible and in accentuating their stances. This will be explained through looking at the way Sands represents the prisoner’s body in his poems, and the way it is seen to be directly integrated in the larger political struggle. That is why this chapter argues that the Republican prisoners’ bodies are also heterotopic, acting as a different space upon which the whole Irish struggle is brought to light.
Finally, the conclusion sums up the main ideas tackled in the study, and it will throw light on the emancipatory potential of the genre of political prison literature. It will show the way Foucault’s paradigms offer a better understanding of this genre. To sum up, the chapters of this study attempt to examine the intersection of politics and literary form; of power and subversion; of resistance and the body; of the physical space and the mythical one; and of the center and the margin.