IUR Review of Irish Literature and the Environment (original) (raw)

Introduction: Eco-Fictions, The Animal Trope and Irish Studies

Estudios Irlandeses, 2020

Copyright (c) 2020 by Margarita Estévez-Saá, Manuela Palacios-González and Noemí Pereira-Ares. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the authors and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access. Nature, animals, the landscape and the environment have enjoyed a recurrent presence and have indeed been constant protagonists in Irish literature and culture. The wild isolated island, originally feared or even despised by foreigners, progressively became that romanticised, premodern Arcadia imagined by tourists from the early twentieth century onwards. The once desolated and barren landscapes of the Great Hunger were imaginatively recreated as green pastures, nostalgically conjured up by nineteenth-and twentieth-century Irish emigrants across the world. More recently, during the decades of the economic boom, the Irish land of the Celtic Tiger was plundered mercilessly by unscrupulous property developers, and its historical sites and natural resources were appropriated as commodities for tourism. These are just some examples of the many uses and abuses of the Irish environment in the recent cultural history of the island. One might expect that the development of Green Studies, Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism(s), Ecocriticism, Ecofeminist Literary Criticism and Animal Studies would, in this sense, be drawn especially to Ireland, yet this has not been the case. Whereas such conceptual frameworks emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, the consolidation of their bases, principles and values in the 1990s, as well as the development of their methodologies, coincided with the years of the Celtic Tiger, when Ireland and the Irish were being carried on a tide of economic prosperity which would have disastrous consequences, although these were only discerned by a small number of artists and intellectuals. Hence, the much-needed revision of and deep reflection on ecology and the environment in Ireland came only after the economic collapse of 2008. This was made manifest through the publication of representative works such as, among others, Terry Gifford's

Environmental Humanities and Irish Studies

Gladwin, Derek. and O'Connor, Maureen. "Environmental Humanities and Irish Studies." Irish Environmental Humanities. Spec. issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 40 (2017): 38-49.

"A Dream of Itself Shelved": Energy Futures in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Long draft of a chapter to appear in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and the Environment, edited by Malcolm Sen, forthcoming from CUP. Please do not cite without requesting permission.] Applying the insights of energy humanities to contemporary Irish novels, this essay takes a first step towards theorizing “the energy unconscious” of post-1970s Irish culture, by exploring the “material relating to energy forms that can be mined and discerned throughout the history of literature.” In so doing, I follow Graeme Macdonald’s call for energy criticism that examines the relationship between culture and environmental history in order to “advance our understanding not only about the present and future energy crises we face, but also the manner in which we (fail to) envisage and conceive energy as a matter for culture as much as it is cultural matter.” Taking a broad approach to “energy futures” across a mixture of genres, I analyse the ways in which energy imaginaries feature in contemporary Irish fiction, including Eilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Bray House, Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, Kevin McDermott's Valentina, Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive, Sarah Maria Griffin's Spare and Found Parts, and Mike McCormack's Solar Bones, focusing in particular on how these novels imagine unevenness, spatialized inequality, and dependency as constitutive features of the neoliberal energy regime in its Irish manifestation.