Ireland, Literature, and the Coast
Seatangled
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:5th Nov '20
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The island of Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.
In sum, this new study is excellently written, capacious in scope, thoroughly researched, and original in approach. It leaves some open strands of argument--from the role of Ireland in the racial dynamics of maritime empire to the potential linkages between Scottish and Irish writing in a devolved archipelago--that others will pick up, tracing their analysis back to Allen's watershed effort. All of which will be part of the lasting impact on Irish, ecocritical, modernist, and contemporary literary studies that Ireland, Literature and the Coast is likely to have. * Nels Pearson, Twentieth Century Literature *
The first major environmentally conscious monograph to appear in Irish Studies... Nicholas Allen's Ireland, Literature and the Coast explores the maritime and watery dimensions of the country... Allen's study will be influential for years to come. * John Kerrigan, LRB *
Brimming with ideas, names and points of reference, Seatangled is an agenda-setting book that will help return the study of modern Irish writing to the coast. * Claire Connolly, Irish Times *
...this crucial volume will energize and long sustain these and much wider conversations about humanity, culture, and our relationship to the nature and environment of the terraqueous globe. * Colin Dewey, Sea History *
Allen fuses Irish literature and his own thalassography into an interdependent essence. Quite an accomplishment. * Dan Maccarthy, Irish Examiner *
I began this book during a summer when European rivers ran dry;...Seatangled reflects the transitional period in which we live, moving from an analysis of water as symbol and metaphor to an exploration of water with powerful agency. * Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Kathryn Kirkpatrick *
ISBN: 9780198857877
Dimensions: 242mm x 164mm x 25mm
Weight: 628g
320 pages