UCD Scholarcast - Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land.  New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.

This lecture takes Thomas Carnduff's shipyard poetry, written in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way in which to understand the complexities of labour which underpinned the products of the shipyards and to reconsider the meaning of the shipyards for Belfast today.

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics...

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip.

This lecture explores the Holyhead Road as a cultural corridor along which people, books, and ideas move, and is part of a larger project examining infrastructural links as sites of cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland from Swift to Joyce.

This lecture is an exploration of the archipelagic island imagination of artist, poet and writer Brenda Chamberlain (1912–71) under the rubric of literary cartography. Part of a wider study of the literary text's 'mapmindedness' – the ways in which imaginative writing accomplishes specifically cartographic 'work' – the paper examines Chamberlain's emotional geographies of the Irish Sea, focusing on her fabling autobiographical account of her residence on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli), off the Llyn Peninsula, north Wales: Tide-race (1962).

The Lecture explores the enduring fascination of the Irish Sea, focusing particularly on the Solway Firth, an area regarded by the nineteenth-century artist, art critic, writer and social reformer, John Ruskin, as second only to the Holy Land in its cultural importance. The ageing Ruskin wrote passionately about the Solway in his autobiography, Praeterita, which pays tribute to the beauty of the coast and its creative legacy, as evident in the work of Walter Scott, J. M. W. Turner and the local Scottish music.

By 1916 the British Empire was at a point of crisis. The beginning of the First World War marked the end of a half-century of expansion in trade and speculation that made the empire a global network for the exchange of capital. Consequently, the foundations of Irish separatism were built in movements antagonistic to world trade. Self-help, folk culture and native language were conceived as late compensation for human losses incurred by the displacement of local resources into the global flow. Irish culture had its own recent and bitter evidence for the decimation of an imperial attachment. The memory of the famine inhabited the same cultural space as the increasing import of traded goods in the second half of the ninteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. So it is that James Joyce's short story 'The Dead' pictures the legacy of hunger through the imagination of a meal. If this first wave of globalization came to an end in Britain with the declaration of war in 1914, it suffered fatal arrest in Ireland in 1916. Reaction to the global empire underpinned the cultural and political movements that fed the rebellion. The Easter Rising was a product of the old order and a siren of the revolutions still to come.