Book Description

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.