Blood Upon the Rose: Easter Rising and Historical Trauma through the Lens of Comics

The recent success of such authors as Art Spiegelman, Joe Kubert and Marjane Satrapi highlighted the comics’ potential in representing and questioning social traumas, collective memory and remembrance, thus paving the way for a prolific and vivacious production of political and historical graphic novels which undeniably deserves critical attention. This research focuses on the Irish author Gerry Hunt and, in particular, on his work Blood Upon the Rose: Easter 1916: The Rebellion that Set Ireland Free published in 2009 by O'Brien Press. Through the tragic story of Joseph Mary Plunkett and his girlfriend Grace Gifford, the 46- page comics is a flashback narration which brings to life the salient moments of the rebellion fought in the streets of Dublin in 1916. The present inquiry is centred around such a representation of conflict and political violence in Ireland. Specifically, it aims at assessing how Hunt’s graphic novel relates to and portrays the Irish past and fight for freedom by identifying multimodal forms and rhetorical as well as visual devices used to depict the conflict on a linguistic, typographic and pictorial level. By virtue of such blending of verbal and visual elements, Blood Upon the Rose gives a new, symbolic dimension to the representation of the Easter Rising and its protagonists, and accordingly turns the readers into witnesses to socio-political events which have shaped and still shape the Irish identity and history.