Coastal Works

Nicholas Allen's work is located at the intersection between literature, history, and visual culture. His interests include the study of modernism, empire, and increasingly, writing about ocean and archipelago. He has taught previously at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he was academic director of the Moore Institute. His books include Broken Landscapes: Selected letters on Ernie O'Malley (Dublin, 2011), Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (CUP, 2009), That Other Island (2007), The Proper Word (2007), George Russell and the New Ireland (2003), and The Cities of Belfast (2003).Nick Groom is an academic and writer. He is professor in English at the University of Exeter and has written widely on literature, music, and contemporary art. He is the author of a dozen books and editions, including The Forger's Shadow (2002), The Union Jack (2006), and, most recently, The Gothic (2012).Jos Smith is an author and researcher with a specialist interest in the intersection of literature and cultural geography. In particular his work explores 'vibrant localism', that is, cultural activity driven by environmental concern that transforms attitudes to place. This is a subject central to his recent book on 'The New Nature Writing' and to his current research project exploring a cultural history of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground.

• 1: Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith.: Introduction 2: Nick Groom: Draining the Irish Channel: Identity, Sustainability, and the Politics of Water 3: Fiona Stafford: The Roar of the Solway 4: Nicholas Allen: Ireland, Literature, and the Coastal Imaginary 5: Andrew Gibson: 'At the Dying Atlantic's Edge': Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast 6: John Brannigan: 'Felt Routes': Louis MacNeice and the North East Atlantic Archipelago 7: Daniel Brayton: The Riddle of the Sands: Erskine Childers Between the Tides 8: Damian Walford Davies: Ronald Lockley and the Archipelagic Imagination 9: Nessa Cronin: Maude Delap's Domestic Science: Island Spaces and Gendered Fieldwork in Irish Natural History 10: Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and John Plunkett: Science at the Seaside: Pleasure Hunts in Victorian Devon 11: Margaret Cohen: Seeing Through Water: The Paintings of Zarh Pritchard 12: Andrew McNeillie: In the Labyrinth: Annotating Aran 13: Jos Smith: Fugitive Allegiances: the Good Ship Archipelago and the Atlantic Edge 14: John R. Gillis: Afterword

Coastal Works gives a new turn to archipelagic studies. It musters an extraordinary range of scholarly disciplines - including literary criticism, cultural history, field studies, marine biology, thalassology and ethnography - to capture the meeting of water and land through its lived history, ecology, literary writings and visual art.