This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

This chapter demonstrates forms of belonging to place in Irish-language poetry and prose.Louis De Paor utilizes Mike Cronin’s term “denizen” to understand alternative forms of belonging in place and notes the military advantages for Irish nationalist fighters traversing the Irish landscape that arose from being able to access local folklore. The essay suggests that “The extent to which intimate knowledge of the local terrain facilitated the kind of guerrilla warfare prosecuted so successfully by Ó hAnnracháin and his comrades (of the Gaelic League) is evident in a significant body of writing in Irish by veterans of the Irish revolution.” This essay spans a wealth of Irish-language writers – from Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910–88), to Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1955–), Colm Breathnach (1961–), and many others. De Paor suggests that the aim of reclaiming “a more secure sense of belonging, of being at home in a place where landscape, language, history and community are fully integrated” is the defining characteristic of Irish-language revival.

Irish poetry’s articulation of and emplotment within a spatial matrix is one of its governing rubrics, whether one tracks a literary-historical genealogy from medieval dinnseanchas poetry or contemporary reflexes of that tradition. This essay considers how Irish poets refract genres of English landscape and pastoral poetry and imagines a map of the island of Ireland as a contiguous or palimpsestic series of writerly domains – with Yeats hovering over Sligo, Ní Dhomhnaill over Kerry, Longley over Mayo, Meehan over Dublin, and so on. The chapter examines the poetics of space and place within particular rural, urban, domestic, or public contexts and reads Irish poetry’s emplacement within a regional, national, or colonial frame. Ireland has a long tradition of pastoral, topographical, and nature writings, but Eric Falci asserts that “this isn’t to suggest that all Irish poetry is topographically minded or concerned to locate itself with geographical precision.” Rather it is a call to recognize that “place” “exists both materially and conceptually in a ceaseless dialectical toggle with ‘space.’”