Description
Book SynopsisThe Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, tracing a history of Irish writing through James Clarence Mangan, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with the archives of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846, the book argues that one of the sources of Irish modernism lies in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. The Ordnance Survey instituted a practice of depicting the country as modern, fragmented, alienated, and troubled, both diagnosing and representing a landscape burdened with the paradoxes of colonial modernity. Subsequent literature returns in varying ways, both imitative and combative, to the complex representational challenge that the Survey confronts and seeks to surmount. From a colonial mapping project to an engine of nationalist imagining, and finally a framework by which to evade the claims of the postcolonial nation, the Ordnance Survey was a central imaginative source of what makes Irish modernist writing both formally innovative and politically challenging. Drawing on literary theory, studies of space, the history of cartography, postcolonial theory, archive theory, and the field Irish Studies, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature paints a picture of Irish writing deeply engaged in the representation of a multi-layered landscape.
Trade Reviewan important new study ... startlingly original schema * Sinéad Sturgeon, Times Literary Supplement *
... convincingly describes a uniquely Irish modernist aesthetic which is grounded in one of the islands most intense moments of cultural and material cartography, and should prove useful for a wide range of scholars interested in the intersections of history, geography, and literature. * Sinéad Sturgeon, Stephen O'Neill, Irish Studies Review *
The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature opens fertile new ground and will surely encourage scholars with nicely polished looking glasses to further scrutinize the relationship between the British Empire's cartographic project and Ireland's modernist literary projects. * Vivian Valvano Lynch, Léirmheasanna: Reviews *
The Survey, for Parsons, is one of the "many possible and actual starting points of a history of Irish modernity and modernism," and what emerges in the book is a brilliant and fresh analysis of the ways in which James Clarence Mangan, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett engage with such a cartographical heritage and postcolonial imperative. * Malcolm Sen, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Maps, Modernity, Modernism I. Archives 1: Archive: The Ordnance Survey Letters 2: Anarchive: James Clarence Mangan among the Ruins II. Scales 3: The Scales of Modernity I: The Aran Islands 4: The Scales of Modernity II: Ulysses' Encyclopedic Narrative Epilogue 5: "Accursed Progenitor!": Beckett's Abstract Landscapes Bibliography Index
