This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture – migration and memory. From its starting point with the ‘New Irish’ generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the technological innovations of 21st-century poetry, this study spans continents, generations, genders and sexualities to reconsider the role of memory and of migration in the work of a range of contemporary Irish poets. Combining sensitive close readings and textual analysis with thorough theoretical application, it sets out the formal, thematic, socio-cultural and literary contexts of migration as an essential aspect of Irish literature. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry explores the figure of the lyrical self in the work of six contemporary Irish poets: Paul Muldoon, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, Alan Gillis and Nick Laird. By focusing on the self, this study offers the first sustained exploration of what is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Irish poetry. Readings utilise the latest theories of the lyric filtered through the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman, and connect an interdisciplinary approach with attention to the operations of the poetic text to bring out aspects of the self in Irish writing that have been given only cursory critical attention so far.

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with colonialism and postcolonialism. With essays on literature, film, drama, graphic novels, and more, the book addresses migration and media, hostile environments, migration and language, migration and literary experiment, migration as palimpsest, and figurations of the migrant. Each section is introduced by one of the handbook’s contributing editors and interviews with writers and film directors are integrated throughout the volume. The essays collected in the volume move beyond the discourse of the “refugee crisis” to trace the historical roots of the current migration situation through colonialism and decolonization.

Race in Irish Literature and Culture provides an in-depth understanding of intersections between Irish literature, culture, and questions of race, racialization, and racism. Covering a vast historical terrain from the sixteenth century to the present, it spotlights the work of canonical, understudied, and contemporary authors in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and among diasporic Irish communities. By focusing on questions related to Black Irish identities, Irish whiteness, Irish racial sciences, postcolonial solidarities, and decolonial strategies to address racialization, the volume moves beyond the familiar frameworks of British/Irish and Catholic/Protestant binarisms and demonstrates methods for Irish Studies scholars to engage with the question of race from a contemporary perspective.

This Companion brings together leading scholars in the field of Irish studies to explore the significance of twenty-first-century Irish writing and its flourishing popularity worldwide. Focusing on Irish writing published or performed in the 21st-century, this volume explores genres, modes, and styles of writing that are current, relevant, and distinctive in today’s classrooms. Examining a host of innovative, key writers, including Sally Rooney, Marion Keyes, Sebastian Barry, Paul Howard, Claire Kilroy, Micheal O’Siadhail, Donal Ryan, Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh, Colette Bryce, Leanne Quinn, Sinéad Morrissey, Paula Meehan, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, and Doireann Ni Ghríofa. This text investigates the socio-cultural and theoretical contexts of their aesthetic achievements and innovations. Furthermore, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Irish Writing traces the expansion of Irish writing, offering fresh insight to Irish identities across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. With its distinctive contemporary contexts and comprehensive scope, this multifaceted volume provides the first significant literary history of 21st century Irish literature.

The crossing of borders and frontiers between political states and between languages and cultures continues to inhibit and bedevil the freedom of movement of both ideas and people. This book addresses the issues arising from problems of translation and communication, the understanding of identity in hyphenated cultures, the relationship between landscape and character, and the multiplex topic of gender transition. Literature as a key to identity in borderland situations is explored here, together with analyses of semiotics, narratives of madness and abjection. The volume also examines the contemporary refugee crisis through first-hand “Personal Witness” accounts of migration, and political, ethnic and religious divisions in Kosovo, Greece, Portugal and North America. Another section, gathering together historical and current “Poetry of Exile”, offers poets’ perspectives on identity and tradition in the context of loss, alienation, fear and displacement.

How did living abroad inflect writers’ perspectives on social change in the countries of their birth and in their adopted homelands? How did writers reformulate ideas of social class, race, and gender in these new contexts? How did they develop innovations in form and technique to achieve a style that reflected their social and political commitments? The essays in this book show how the “outward turn” that typifies late modernist writing was precipitated, in part, by writers’ experience of expatriation. Late Modernism & Expatriation encompasses writing from the 1930s to the present day and considers expatriation in both its voluntary and coerced manifestations. Together, the essays in this book shape our understanding of how migration (especially in its late twentieth- and twenty-first century complexities) affects late modernism’s temporalities. The book attends to major theoretical questions about mapping late modernist networks and it foregrounds neglected aspects of writers’ work while placing other writers in a new frame.

Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century. Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.