Chapter 7 - Ireland, Literature, and the Blue Humanities

Summary

The modern idea of Ireland as a nation-state formed from the break-up of empire in partition and decolonization proceeds from concepts of place and belonging that are largely territorial and landed. The recent centenaries of partition and the civil war have shown how little we thought of those literary works that expressed the diversity of life in the fractures between state and nation. This chapter asks how we might think more carefully now about the peripheral and the marginal as cultural registers of a contemporary experience that is historicizable in newly fluid ways. In one sense, this practice builds on decades of historicist and postcolonial criticism. In another, it relates to conversations going on in other parts of the academy, where terms like the Global South are being rethought in terms of their oceanic, and their cultural, futurity.