Stepping through Origins: Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature

Description

Since the eighteenth century, landscape has played complex psychological and political roles in the narrative of Irishness, entailing questions of memory, family, home, exile, and forgiveness. In Stepping through Origins, Holdridge explores the interplay of these concepts in literature. For Irish writers from Swift to Heaney, the Irish landscape has remained not only a reflection of Irish troubles but, much like aesthetic experience, a space in which the bitterness of family or national life can be understood, if not entirely overcome. Through deft analysis of works by leading Irish writers including Lady Morgan, Yeats, Joyce, Louis MacNeice, and Elizabeth Bowen, Holdridge expands and enriches our understanding of how landscape has served as a palimpsest for both family and country, connecting personal with collective memory, localized places with their regions, and individual with national identity. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Stepping through Origins Tumbling Down into the Sky Great Hunger, Unspeakable Home Some Fragments Like a Hippogriff A Sterner Eye Bleeding from the Torn Bough Like Splintered Darkness Through Tightly Closed Eyes Solving Ambiguities The Rising Sap Beneath Tilth and Loam In Defiance of Human Frontiers Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Notes Bibliography Index