Ireland, Literature, and the Coast

Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and Endowed Professor in Humanities at the University of Georgia. A native of Belfast, he has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.

• Introduction 1: The Maritime Yeats 2: Erskine Childers and The Riddle of the Sands 3: Coastal Joyce 4: Jack Yeats's Scrapbooks 5: At the Ebb Tide: Literary Cultures and Mid-Century Ireland 6: Heaney Offshore 7: Liquid Labyrinths: The North and the Sea 8: Wavy Rhythms: Atlantic Crossings in Fiction 9: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Poetry, and Water 10: Fluidity and Form in Hamilton, Banville, and Enright 11: Kevin Barry's Atlantic Drift 12: Into the Archipelago Conclusion

In sum, this new study is excellently written, capacious in scope, thoroughly researched, and original in approach. It leaves some open strands of argument--from the role of Ireland in the racial dynamics of maritime empire to the potential linkages between Scottish and Irish writing in a devolved archipelago--that others will pick up, tracing their analysis back to Allen's watershed effort. All of which will be part of the lasting impact on Irish, ecocritical, modernist, and contemporary literary studies that Ireland, Literature and the Coast is likely to have.