Awards

• Winner of Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book 2019

Overview

This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of 'place' and developed a 'spatial turn' that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea region thought about writing, place and identity. Living on an island at the edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how geography can shape a people. This book is the first full-length study of medieval Irish topographical writing. It situates the theories and poetics of Irish place developed over six centuries in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes in the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape, environmental writing and postcolonial identity construction. Presenting focused studies of important literary texts by authors from Ireland and Britain, it shows how these discourses influenced European conceptions of place and identity, as well as understandings of how to write the world.

Full Product Details

9781526160751

Table of Contents

Reviews

'This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space.' The North American journal of Celtic Studies 'Scholars of the literatures and cultures of the medieval North Atlantic world broadly, and of Ireland specifically, will find this an indispensable and vibrant study for thinking more deeply into the concepts of the geospatial turn, literary marginalization and centralization of Ireland and the Irish, and the writing of landscape and environment, while scholars of the poetics of space should find this book a very welcome invitation to further reflection upon the relationship of author and reader to text and of text and words to place.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology -- .

'Scholars of the literatures and cultures of the medieval North Atlantic world broadly, and of Ireland specifically, will find this an indispensable and vibrant study for thinking more deeply into the concepts of the geospatial turn, literary marginalization and centralization of Ireland and the Irish, and the writing of landscape and environment, while scholars of the poetics of space should find this book a very welcome invitation to further reflection upon the relationship of author and reader to text and of text and words to place.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology -- .

'This scintillating book persuasively argues for an Irish poetics of space.' The North American journal of Celtic Studies 'Scholars of the literatures and cultures of the medieval North Atlantic world broadly, and of Ireland specifically, will find this an indispensable and vibrant study for thinking more deeply into the concepts of the geospatial turn, literary marginalization and centralization of Ireland and the Irish, and the writing of landscape and environment, while scholars of the poetics of space should find this book a very welcome invitation to further reflection upon the relationship of author and reader to text and of text and words to place.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology -- .

Author Information

Amy C. Mulligan is Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame

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