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This collection of essays examines the theme of liminality in Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity and focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts.
What constitutes a ‘national literature’ is rarely straightforward, and it is especially complex when discussing writing for young people in an Irish context. Until recently, there was only a slight body of work that could be classified as ‘Irish children’s literature’ (whatever the parameters) in comparison with Ireland’s contribution to adult literature in the twentieth century. This volume looks critically at Irish writing for children from the 1980s to the present, examining the work of many writers and illustrators and engaging with all the major forms and genres. Topics include the gothic, the speculative, picturebooks, poetry, post-colonial discourse, identity and ethnicity, and globalization. Modern Irish children’s literature is also contextualized in relation to Irish mythology and earlier writings, thereby demonstrating the complexity of this fascinating area. The contributors, who are leading experts in their fields, examine a range of texts in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory, and also in relation to writing for adults, thereby inviting a consideration of how well writing for a young audience can compare with writing for an adult one. This groundbreaking work is essential reading for all interested in Irish literature, childhood, and children’s literature.
This book uncovers a new genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’, consisting of a body of texts – fiction, poetry and drama – by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. In an attempt to demarcate the literary-aesthetic parameters of the genre, the book proposes a selective revision of postcolonial theories on ‘liminality’ through a subset of concepts such as ‘negative liminality’, ‘liminal suspension’ and ‘liminal permanence.’ These conceptual interventions, as the readings demonstrate, help articulate how the Agreement’s rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign towards a ‘progressive’ future breed new forms of violence that produce liminally suspended subject positions.
This book analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies and demonstrates how and why various physical and symbolic boundaries create liminality and transgression. Its focus is on comprehending the ways in which these borders and boundaries generate liminality and transgression rather than viewing them solely as issues. It provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. It consists of theoretical and empirical chapters that demonstrate how borders and liminality are interconnected. The book also benefits from the power of several visual essays by artists to complete the theoretical and empirical chapters which demonstrate different forms of liminality without need of much words. The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political science, migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts.
Examining the fairies of medieval romance as liminal beings, this book draws on anthropological and philosophical studies of liminality to combine folkloristic insights into the nature of fairies with close readings of selected romance texts. Tracing different meanings and manifestations of liminality in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal, Thomas of Erceldoune and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, the volume offers a comprehensive theory of liminality rooted in structuralist anthropology and poststructuralist theory. Arguing that romance fairies both embody and represent the liminal, The Liminality of Fairies posits and answers fundamental theoretical questions about the limits of representation and the relationship between romance hermeneutics and criticism. The interdisciplinary nature of the argument will appeal not just to medievalists and literary critics but also to anthropologists, folklorists as well as scholars working within the fields of cultural history and contemporary literary theory.
Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction offers an original and much-needed study of Irish Lesbian fiction. Evaluating a wide body of Irish lesbian fiction ranging from the Victorian era to the contemporary age, this book advocates for women writers who have been largely ignored in Irish literary history and criticism. This volume examines the use and applications of space in Irish lesbian fiction. In recent years, it can be argued that Irish society has created a new ‘space’ for LGBT or queer people. The concept of space is, thus, important both symbolically and physically for lesbian literature. In asking, if Irish women writers have moved ‘out of the shadows’ so to speak, what space is open to the Irish lesbian author? How is spatiality reflected in lesbian representation throughout Irish literary history? Space and Irish Lesbian Fiction examines a diverse range of writers from the nineteenth century to the contemporary age, evaluating the contributions of largely unknown authors who have been overlooked alongside more established voices within Irish literature. The concept of liminality that this volume takes as its theme and focus engage with notions of intersectionality, thresholds, crossings and transitions. In suggesting the overlap between the indeterminate threshold of the liminal space and its ambiguously queer potentiality to examine the dynamics of space and its relationship to lesbianism, this ground-breaking project both locates and charts spaces of queer liminality in Irish lesbian fiction.
Borderlands, boundaries and frontiers are crucibles for diverse cultures and multiple alternative histories. Nowhere is this truer than in the debateable lands between nation states in what is commonly known as the British Isles. This collection takes the reader on an imaginative journey inside the borders, offering a fresh perspective on the liminality of these porous and contested terrains and the liminal peoples therein. Implicitly or explicitly, the contributors to this volume, in one way or another acknowledge that the term ‘borderland’ is imprecise, ambiguous and never neutral, and due to its liminal status, a crucible for multiple and competing identities. As the essays in this collection show, these borders don’t have to be geographical, but can extend to any cultural, psychic or social terrain which exists beyond or between accepted categories, power structures, nations or states. This collection concerns itself with Borders Theory in its multifarious manifestations from pre-history to the present day. Border Crossings draws together a number of key researchers in their respective fields and enables a dialogue between different disciplines and theoreticians. More generally, in its disciplinary and theoretical scope, the collection links with a number of other works, whilst its focus on England, Ireland and Scotland maintains its distinctiveness and addresses an area of comparative critical neglect.
Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickens’s writings: the rites of passage represented by such transitional moments and ceremonies as birth/christenings, weddings/marriages, and death. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the family in Dickens’s works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickens’s religious beliefs, neither his views on death and dying nor his ideas about the afterlife have been analysed in any great detail. Moreover, this collection, arising from a conference on Dickens held in Thessaloniki in 2012, explores how Dickens’s preoccupation with these transitional phases reflects his own liminality and his varying positions regarding some main Victorian concerns, such as religion, social institutions, progress, and modes of writing. The book is composed of four parts: Part One concerns Dickens’s tendency to see birth and death as part of a continuum rather than as entirely separate states; Part Two looks at his unconventional responses to adolescence as a transitional period and to the marriage ceremony as an often unsuccessful rite de passage; Part Three analyses his partial divergence from certain widely held Victorian views about progress, evolution, sanitation, and the provisions made for the poor; and Part Four focuses on two of his novels which are seen as transgressing conventional genre boundaries.
Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture: Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary feminist Irish and diasporic authors, such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Tana French, cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. This book contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts such as W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, James Joyce, and Mairtín Ó Cadhain. Exploring the intersections of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies, Christin M. Mulligan engages with media from the ninth century to present day and considers how these writer-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire.
The delineation and emergence of the Irish border radically reshaped political and social realities across the entire island of Ireland. For those who lived in close quarters with the border, partition was also an intimate and personal occurrence, profoundly implicated in everyday lives. Otherwise mundane activities such as shopping, visiting family, or travelling to church were often complicated by customs restrictions, security policies, and even questions of nationhood and identity. The border became an interface, not just of two jurisdictions, but also between the public, political space of state territory, and the private, familiar spaces of daily life. The effects of political disunity were combined and intertwined with a degree of unity of everyday social life that persisted and in some ways even flourished across, if not always within, the boundaries of both states. On the border, the state was visible to an uncommon degree -- as uniformed agents, road blocks, and built environment -- at precisely the same point as its limitations were uniquely exposed. For those whose worlds continued to transcend the border, the power and hegemony of either of those states, and the social structures they conditioned, could only ever be incomplete. As a consequence, border residents lived in circumstances that were burdened by inconvenience and imposition, but also endowed with certain choices. Influenced by microhistorical approaches, Unapproved Routes uses a series of discrete 'histories' -- of the Irish Boundary Commission, the Foyle Fisheries dispute, cockfighting tournaments regularly held on the border, smuggling, and local conflicts over cross-border roads -- to explore how the border was experienced and incorporated into people's lives; emerging, at times, as a powerfully revealing site of popular agency and action.