"The West" in the Irish Literary Imagination

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

As the last frontier of Western Europe, the West of Ireland has long held a reputation as a place apart - a place to which urbanites flock to escape the hubbub of modern life and a spiritual place where "peace comes dropping slow". During the nineteenth century, educated classes- antiquarians, philologists, artists, and writers-travelled to this so-called pre-colonial idyll to uncover vestiges of pagan life, the Irish language, and a culture untouched by modernity. However, this unforgiving landscape was also setting to many cruel hardships as its towns and villages were marked by famine and emigration. Irish writing is inextricably linked to the history of the island and its interactions with its own troubled past and with other cultures. Reading the literature of the country students will learn about the history of modern Ireland and the various social, political and cultural debates that shaped a nation. This course will introduce students to a selection of Ireland's canonical writers beginning with the cultural Revival in the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century right up until the contemporary moment. It offers students an opportunity to engage with the various ways in which 'the West' of Ireland is represented and reproduced in the literary imagination and to interrogate various versions of the landscape through multiple theoretical lenses including postcolonialism, feminism, and ecocriticism. The course also seeks to engage students with their surroundings in the West of Ireland and to understand textual interventions in questions regarding language, landscape, nature, place and ecology. Finally, students will gain an understanding of the role of myth in culture and identity formation and will be encouraged to interrogate competing notions of Irishness through the prescribed readings on this course.