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Unfolding Irish landscapes offers a comprehensive and sustained study of the work of cartographer, landscape writer and visual artist Tim Robinson. The visual texts and multi-genre essays included in this book, from leading international scholars in Irish Studies, geography, ecology, environmental humanities, literature and visual culture, explore Robinson’s writing, map-making and art. Robinson’s work continues to garner significant attention not only in Ireland, but also in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, particularly with the recent celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his monumental Stones of Aran: pilgrimage. Robert Macfarlane has described Robinson’s work in Ireland as ‘one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out’. It is difficult to separate Robinson the figure from his work and the places he surveys in Ireland – they are intertextual and interconnected. This volume explores some of these characteristics for both general and expert readers alike. As individual studies, the essays in this collection demonstrate disciplinary expertise. As parts of a cohesive project, they form a collective overview of the imaginative sensibility and artistic dexterity of Robinson’s cultural and geographical achievements in Ireland. By navigating Robinson’s method of ambulation through his prose and visual creations, this book examines topics ranging from the politics of cartography and map-making as visual art forms to the cultural and environmental dimensions of writing about landscapes.
.5 ). When pieced together, the survey’s trajectory moves sequentially from east to west, from the demesne’s interface with the town towards the pier, the islands and the bogs of Ireland’s western frontier ( Figure 15.6 ). Replicating in miniature the Irish landscape’s precarious nineteenth-century imbalance, the pretty flower gardens, shady tree-lined walks and elegant lakeside
Ireland is a turbulent place. This book engages readers with the contours of transformation of Irish society through a series of distinct episodes and sites where change can be confronted. The content of the book intersects with the boom and bust themes to explore the economic and social implications of the recession. The processes are as diverse as cross-border development, farming knowledges, food movements, and the evolution of traditional Irish music. The modernisation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise was a 'spatial drama' involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. The first part of the book explores the revolving intersections of identity politics with place. It tracks the discovery of the ghost estate and the ways in which it has been implicated in debates about the Irish economic crash, complicating ideas of home and community. After a discussion on immigration, the book discusses the role of migrants in filling labour and skill shortages. The second part pays attention to questions of mobility and consumption in urban and rural contexts. The new Irish motorway network, free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger, and the role of National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) are discussed. The third part explores diverse cultural practices and some longstanding representations of Ireland. An autobiographical tour of the pub session, National Geographic's representations of Irish landscape and the current Irish imagination are the key concepts of this part.
Chapter 3 Rural Ireland, mythmaking and transatlantic translation a place as kind as it is green the greenest place I’ve never seen.1 In her poem ‘Spenser’s Ireland’, Marianne Moore asserts (with some self-mockery) a practice that was becoming ever more common within the work of her contemporaries – an idealisation of the Irish landscape from afar, despite an awareness of this act. Fintan O’Toole theorises that the ‘invention of modern Ireland was driven by the Romantic search for a culture organically rooted in an authentic landscape. What was to be read in
as an exotic other on the edge of Europe. For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was perceived as a comparatively poor, quaintly nostalgic location for the American imagination. Even during the brash economic boom in the late twentieth century, NG’s representations of Irish landscape and society frequently reached back to earlier lyrical imagery of a laid-back, misty isle. While critically evaluating its depictions of Ireland, our own self-image in the first half of the twentieth century in many ways mirrored what NG was doing – a discourse of rural social
and the horizon created is an often violent and cruel intrusion 207 208 Moynagh Sullivan into any possible easing into a nostalgic relationship with a romanticised or feminised Irish landscape. In the chapter titled ‘Into the Mist’, from the final part of the trilogy Last Pool of Darkness, Robinson begins with lines that recall the matrixiality of water and white horse in Sheridan’s film Into the West: Aughrus – Eachros, horse peninsula, in proper Irish – is the broad, low-lying lobe of land at the head of the peninsula south-west of Cleggan bay. Its main
contributed to the crisis. This chapter provides a short synopsis of the ghost estate issue, detailing the factors that contributed to the phenomenon, the way in which the estates have been invoked as symbolic spaces within the national narrative of collapse, and the State’s response in the form of the National Assets Management Agency. The Irish property bubble The presence of ghost estates in the Irish landscape exemplifies the problems associated with the Celtic Tiger property boom. Put simply, too many houses were built. From 1996 to 2005, 553,267 houses were built in
Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean draws together essays and arguments from a diverse group of contributors who seek to explore the many and varied ways in which Ireland and the Caribbean share an interlocking Atlantic history. This shared history is not always a comfortable one. Despite being victims of the first English empire, Irish people enslaved others throughout this period, and can be found at the cutting edge of extractive colonialism. They profited, exploited, traded, and trafficked with the very worst of European opportunists. Irish merchants and enslavers operated in the grey zone between empires. They could be found trading within the Danish, French and Dutch empires, as well as within the British empire, with which they were more properly connected. Irish people also shared an experience of colonialism themselves, and this opens a series of interesting avenues and rich ironies for the contributors to untangle and interrogate. The Caribbean had an outsized impact on Ireland itself, as many of the chapters argue. Irish estates were modelled or named for Caribbean precursors, just as the colonial engineering of the Irish landscapes affected those in Jamaica, Trinidad and elsewhere. The relationship was reciprocal and complex. This collection builds on the sterling work of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London, as well as the pioneering scholarship of Nini Rodgers. It brings together literary scholars, architectural historians, historians of colonialism, and art historians. The result is a novel exploration of the deep and complex relationship between two island archipelagos in a period of peak colonialism.
Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland, such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral, falling outside of the dominant disciplinary narratives of nationalism or modernism. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book chiefly examines artworks by of Walter Frederick Osborne (1857–1903), Rose Mary Barton (1856–1929), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900–74), Estella Frances Solomons (1882–1968), and Flora Hippisley Mitchell (1890–1973), encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate how the city was also the subject of a range of visual depictions, including those in painting and print. Focusing on the images created by these artists as they navigated the city’s streets, this book offers a vivid visualisation of Dublin and its inhabitants, challenging a reengagement with Ireland’s art history through the prism of the city and urban life.
vision. The field of Irish cultural studies has yet to exploit fully the critical and analytical resources of ecological criticism. Indeed very little sustained and enabling historical or critical writing has emanated from the field that might productively contribute to international conversations on the political and cultural implications of global environmental change.There have always been creative and critical engagements with the Irish landscape – a trend partly occasioned by the country’s protracted history of colonialism (a prime concern of ecological criticism