Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction discusses the representations of place and landscape in Irish fiction since 2008. It includes novels and short stories by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger, Anne Enright, Donal Ryan, Claire Kilroy, Kevin Barry, Gerard Donovan, Danielle McLaughlin, Trisha McKinney, Billy O’Callaghan and Colum McCann. In the light of writings by geographers, anthropologists and philosophers such as Doreen Massey, Tim Ingold, Giorgio Agamben and Jeff Malpas, this book looks at the metamorphoses of place and landscape representations in fiction by confirmed or debut authors, in the aftermath of a crisis with deep economic as well as cultural consequences for Irish society. It shows what place and landscape representations reveal of the past, while discussing the way notions such as boundedness, openness and emergence can contribute to thinking out space and place and designing future landscapes.
Introduction
Part I: Opening up landscapes : renegotiating places in William Trevor’s ‘At Olivehill’ (2007) and Dermot Bolger’s A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (2010)
Chapter 1: Reprocessing landscapes in William Trevor’s ‘At Olivehill’
Chapter 2: Challenging containment in Dermot Bolger’s A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (2010)
Part II: Metamorphoses of landscape in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart
Chapter 3: From lust to bust: landscapes of desire in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz
Chapter 4: Between degeneration and regeneration: the crumbling of place in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart
Part III: Landscapes of the future in The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy and in the City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Chapter 5: Trying the beast: in The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy
Chapter 6: Placing nostalgia in the City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Part IV: In-between landscapes : short stories of the seaside and the poetics of hope in Colum McCann’s fiction.
Chapter 7: On the edge: seascapes in five contemporary Irish short stories.
Chapter 8: Mapping the contemporary: place and movement
Chapter 9: Being between: Inhabiting the present
Biography
Marie Mianowski is associate professor at the University of Nantes where she teaches contemporary literature in English, as well as literary translation. Her research focuses on Irish studies as well as place and landscape issues in literature and the arts. In 2012, she edited Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts.
