{"id":381,"date":"2021-04-22T10:35:59","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T08:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/?page_id=381"},"modified":"2021-05-06T08:38:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T06:38:00","slug":"abstracts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/abstracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPoetry and \u00abthe Pencil of Love\u00bb: The Early Anglo-Irish Ekphrasis of Mary Tighe\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Charles Armstrong, University of Agder<\/em><\/p>\n

Although ample critical attention has been paid to Irish literature responding to the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, little notice has been given to pre-Yeatsian ekphrasis in Ireland. This paper will look at two early instances of poetry about pictures in the writings of Mary Tighe (1772-1810). Tighe\u2019s \u201cThe Picture: Written for Angela\u201d and \u201cTo Lady Charlemont, in Return for her Presents of Flowers, March, 1808\u201d will be shown to be heavily marked by their time, evincing distinctive traits characteristic of the Age of Sensibility, Irish Protestant privilege drawing upon the tradition of the Grand Tour, and a form of Romantic manuscript culture. But Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later developments that still not have been given full critical cognizance. By demonstrating links between her ekphrastic practice and Richardson\u2019s novels, I will challenge the usually so water-tight separation between poetic and prose ekphrasis, even while showing how Tighe probes into the neglected parerga at the borders of the visual representation. Tighe will also be shown to anticipate later emphasis on the aesthetics of ekphrasis, as she aligns visual art with a non-instrumental gift of flowers from her friend, Lady Charlemont. The Eros and agency of the visual object \u2013 what pictures want, as thematized in the work of W. J. T. Mitchell \u2013 will also be seen to be at work in these early and unjustly neglected instances of Irish ekphrasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Strands in the Fabric of the Nation \u2013 English Migrants to Irish Citizens?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vikki Barry Brown, Queen Mary University of London<\/em><\/p>\n

English people in Ireland form a significant but under-researched group set within a complex and entangled historical relationship between the two countries. Through colonialism, the presence of English people in Ireland could be viewed as simultaneously contested and banal. The Irish State, established in opposition to British rule to an extent constructed Irish identity as white and Catholic, shaping enduring assumptions around who \u2018gets\u2019 to be Irish.<\/p>\n

In the three years following the UK\u2019s \u2018Brexit\u2019 referendum, applications for Irish citizenship by British nationals\u00a0 residing in Ireland, rose year upon year, despite those citizens being somewhat protected by the reciprocal rights afforded to British and Irish nationals under the Common Travel Area (CTA), unlike British Citizens in the remainder of the EU27. These applications may symbolise attempts by British citizens to retain EU membership that would be otherwise lost following Brexit, but is that the whole story? Drawing on research gathered as part of my PhD \u2018Being English in Ireland\u2019 which explores the lives of English migrants to Ireland since 1960, this paper will consider how these individuals negotiate their identity through the examination of their motivations and experiences as new and soon-to-be Irish citizens.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cA Young Man Is Dead, a Legend Has Been Born.\u2019 The Death of Bobby Sands: an Extreme Act of Redemptive Violence?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Braidwood, University of Oulu<\/em><\/p>\n

In the contested space of Northern Ireland Bobby Sands has remained a powerfully divisive figure; he is much derided by his detractors and the subject of much hyperbole by his supporters. To some he is a Christ-like, messianic, martyr-icon, to others a bloodthirsty, murderous terrorist. For many Bobby Sands\u00a0represented a combination of traditional sentimental Roman Catholic devotionalism and the collective self-deification of\u00a0the anticipation of ultimate salvation, a\u00a0liberation theology of sorts;\u00a0for others this convicted bomber and \u2018gunman\u2019 quickly came to embody all of the heinous crimes of the IRA. His emaciated body lies at the core of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, his death being the watershed in the Troubles, representing the point where a vortex of hopelessness turned paradoxically into glimmers of hope and the seeds for an end to the conflict; a potent, redemptive event of catalysing intensity in a time of deepening despair. Where is the real Bobby Sands? The H-Block Protests and the ten deaths were greeted with increasingly uncomprehending consternation by the British, and mostly with bemused indifference towards a distant and remote \u2013 almost foreign \u2013 \u2018northern problem\u2019 in the South of Ireland, while worsening\u00a0the old antagonisms in the North.\u00a0The manner of his dying and death attracted global sympathy and interest, which rapidly tipped the balance in favour of northern Republicanism. Is it time now to finally lay Bobby Sands to rest?<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cA Society of Blatant Inequalities\u2019: Identifying Injustice in\u00a0Rocky Road to Dublin<\/em>\u00a0(Peter Lennon, 1967)\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Se\u00e1n Crosson, NUI Galway<\/em><\/p>\n

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland on screen was defined to an overwhelming extent by foreign directors and perspectives. Within the oppressive context of early twentieth Ireland, film was viewed with suspicion by the establishment, evident in the restrictive Censorship of Films Act enacted in 1923 under the auspices of the Ministry of Home Affairs (a precursor to the Department of Justice), and one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the newly independent D\u00e1il \u00c9ireann (parliament) of the Irish Free State. As a result, the employment of film as a critical tool to examine Irish society and identify injustice was slow to develop. Rather, film was an important part of the popular cultural context that sustained prevailing conceptions of Irishness and the position of moral authorities (above all the Catholic Church) within Irish society, evident in particular in the sympathetic portrayals found repeatedly of the Irish priest, one of the most recognisable Irish stereotypes in the cinema. This paper examines Irish cinema in the first half of the twentieth century in light of the existence of Ireland\u2019s \u2018architecture of containment\u2019 (Smith 2001) that contributed to ongoing injustices highlighted in Peter Lennon\u2019s ground-breaking 1968 documentary\u00a0Rocky Road to Dublin<\/em>, a key text in identifying the \u201csociety of blatant inequalities\u201d\u201d that prevailed in Ireland.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeckett and the Bedsit: The London Rented Rooms of\u00a0Murphy<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jason Finch, \u00c5bo Akademi University<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Variations on the near-empty space appear in multiple works by Samuel Beckett. This paper explores those found in his 1938 novel\u00a0Murphy<\/em>, asking how its textual space relates to actual rented rooms. Put bluntly, did the bedsit life affect literary content? People\u2019s access to residential property is an aspect of urban spatial justice in which economics figures alongside perceptions of gender and ethnicity. It fits into a broader study of London residential space in literature, which works with the dialectic of slum and neighbourhood. The word slum first (in the 1820s) labelled a crowded central London neighbourhood said by writers to have been packed with Irish immigrants. In the twentieth century, working-class Irish incomers to London faced racism.<\/p>\n

Toponymically rich,\u00a0Murphy<\/em>\u00a0depicts both street-level neighbourhoods and neighbour relations inside houses. The former are identifiably those of 1930s London in low-status localities close to industry but also not far from central and wealthy districts. It also has bigger spatial frames: spanning London; using London as a link in a chain from Ireland to France. I read the novel against three contexts. In relation to the spaces of Beckett\u2019s life and works,\u00a0Murphy\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0identifiable topographies distinguish it from Beckett\u2019s post-war works, but I trace connections between the different phases. Second is evidence on the spatial politics of room renting in 1930s London, specifically as they affected incomers from Ireland. Thirdly, the paper adds to a growing body of work investigating housing and modernist-era British literature (Cuming 2016; Finch and Kelly 2021).<\/p>\n

\u201cMigrants in the City: Spatial Injustice and Inward Migration in Contemporary Irish Literature\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Deirdre Flynn, Mary Immaculate College<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2000 the Irish Government established the Direct Provision system as a temporary measure to deal with the growing numbers of international protection applicants arriving in Ireland. Designed to be a short-term solution, it was expected that the direct provision centres would house people for a maximum of 6 months while their application was being processed. Twenty years later the system is still in place, housing nearly 7000 people for an average of 24 \u2013 36 months, with over 5% waiting over 7 years for a decision on their application. Left in limbo, these people are citizens of nowhere.<\/p>\n

In 2018, Melatu Uche Okorie published a collection of stories called\u00a0This Hostel Life<\/em>, detailing life in direct provision, and the racism experienced on the streets of Dublin for inward migrants to Ireland. In her story \u2018Under the Awning\u2019 Okorie, who spent eight years in the Irish Direct Provision system, illustrates how the streets of the city are not a welcoming place for black migrants. Her protagonist is \u2018desperate not to stand out\u2026so people were not made to feel uncomfortable\u2019 by her presence (Okorie 2018). For the inward migrant the public space of the global city does not correspond with the public image of Ireland of the Welcomes.<\/p>\n

This paper, using examples from contemporary writing on Ireland\u2019s Direct Provision system, will discuss Ireland\u2019s response to inward migration. Focusing on how the global city of Dublin is represented and negotiated in these works.<\/p>\n

\u201cJustice in the War and at Home \u2013 Utopian Hopes of Fair Solutions<\/strong>\u00a0in Sebastian\u00a0Barry\u2019s Days Without End<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Mid-Sweden University<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>If one definition of justice is \u201cceaseless individual responsibility for the victims\u2026of wars and violence\u201d, it is safe to say that injustice is the ceaseless shirking from such responsibility. In\u00a0Days Without End<\/em>, a novel of Irishmen involved in wars in nineteenth-century United States, Sebastian Barry is unsparing in his critique of such avoidance. His depiction of atrocities committed by whites against Native Americans \u2013 and also, more briefly, against black Union soldiers in the Civil War \u2013 leaves no doubt about the extent of that which he refers to as \u201cthe sheer\u2026brutality of it all.\u201d The novel is grim, but funny and gentle, too \u2013 remarkably so in the light of the ground it covers.<\/p>\n

If, moreover, justice is a \u201ccomplex term for finding fair solutions to challenges in personal relations,\u201d then, indeed, the central characters in Barry\u2019s tale \u2013 Thomas McNulty, \u201cchild of poor Sligonians,\u201d and John Cole, \u201cwhose people were run out\u201d of the American East long ago \u2013 find themselves enmeshed in questions of justice. They are professional soldiers, but they also, seemingly nurturing an unspoken \u2013 arguably utopian \u2013 hope, pursue possibilities of finding sustainable alternatives to conventional modes of being in society. My paper will explore how, driven by silent hopes of fair solutions in their lives, Thomas and John come to engage, not only in warfare, but in cross-dressing, adoption across ethnic boundaries, and same-sex marriage. In doing so, they attempt to resist the false and destructive boundaries by which individuals of certain ethnicity or sexual orientation are separated from mainstream society.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018You Can\u2019t Grab Anything with a Closed Fist\u2019: Reflections on Ulster Protestant\u00a0<\/strong>Identity in Derek Lundy\u00b4s Memoir\u00a0Men that God Made Mad: A Journey Through\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Billy Gray, Dalarna University<\/em><\/p>\n

In Ireland and within Irish studies itself, considerable effort has been expended in the attempt to disclose the complex interaction between past conflicts and contemporary attempts to recoup their significance in the present. Given that the interpretation of historical events has often been at the heart of national conflict, there have frequently been fierce clashes between rival versions of a common past. Derek Lundy\u00b4s\u00a0Men that<\/em>\u00a0God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland<\/em>\u00a0a work of non-fiction published in 2006, is an invaluable and timely contribution to our understanding of the selectivity of national memory and the indelible link that exists between familial remembrance and its communal counterpart. As a work of historical investigation, it sheds light on the interaction between repressed cultural memories, communal and national amnesia and the evasion of the past.<\/p>\n

A generically hybrid work, part historical investigation, part memoir, Lundy\u00b4s text combines a blend of meticulous research with autobiographical snapshots, interspersed with an exploration of the connection between personal and collective identities. Claiming that \u00b4the lives of my ancestors resonate in the very core of Ulster history\u00b4\u00b4 Lundy uses the lives of three such ancestors as a prism through which to examine the standard, received stories of myth and history so prominent within the Ulster Protestant tradition. In doing so, Lundy\u00b4s narrative provides support for Jean Braham\u2019s view that \u201cWe see the past in something of the same way as we see a Henry Moore sculpture. The \u2018holes\u2019 define the shape. What is left repressed or what cannot be uttered, is often as significant\u2026as what is said\u201d. Moreover Lundy, through an engagement with his own personal background as a member of an Ulster Protestant family, positions himself in a metaphorical space where individual memory, cultural allegiance and concepts of the self merge. My paper will seek to show how Lundy\u2019s text, in attempting to investigate the past with \u2018thoughts of salvage,\u2019 can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a renegotiation of selfhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnvironmental Justice and Posthuman Poetics in Contemporary Irish Poetry\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anne Karhio<\/em>,\u00a0National University of Ireland<\/em><\/p>\n

This presentation addresses the idea of environmental justice in contemporary Irish poetry in the context of an emerging posthuman consciousness, and a posthuman poetics. This means the questioning of the centrality of the category of \u201chuman\u201d, and exploring forms of engagement with the world as more than an \u201cobject of knowledge\u201d or \u201cthing\u201d, a creation of \u201cthe productions of knowledge [by] the human knower\u201d, as Donna Haraway has argued (\u201cSituated Knowledges\u201d). In the poems addressed here, environmental justice or injustice is addressed in specific contexts related to the consumer society, the effects of multinational capitalism, or the destruction of human and non-human habitats. There is also, however, a more profound paradigm shift in the implicit challenging of the human perspective as a foundation for a sustainable ethics, or the human as \u201cthe food chain\u2019s top banana\u201d as Leontia Flynn writes in \u201cSecond Dialogue\u201d (The Radio<\/em>, 2018). In a number of poems, this is expressed through a recalibration of the first-person verbal-visual point of view, as well as of sense of scale. The perspectives of non-human animals or machine perception often replace the presumed subject-position of the speaking voice. In Derek Mahon\u2019s \u201cBeing a Dog\u201d (Against the Clock<\/em>, 2018) there is \u201cno inter-species dialogue\u201d to translate what the dog \u201cknows\u201d into human terms (or into human knowledge\u201d), and Peter Sirr\u2019s \u201cVision\u201d similarly recognizes the \u201cdog\u2019s eye view of the world\u201d (Gravity Wave<\/em>, 2019). In the long sequence that forms the second part of Justin Quinn\u2019s\u00a0Fuselage<\/em>\u00a0(2002), the distinction between human and machine vision is blurred in the repeated image of eyes monitoring individuals at different stages of the global trade on consumer goods (\u201cTwo eyes watch the earth\u201d, \u201cThe two eyes watch them all the time\u201d, \u201cthe sky-hooked eye\u2026of fluidity and ochlocracy\u201d). At the same time planetary and microscopic scales co-exist in the flow of goods and pixels on screen, across the planet. Mahon\u2019s \u201cA Country Road\u201d moves beyond the familiar trope of a rural landscape and senses, and recognizes how \u201ccloud swirls on the globe\u201d while \u201cbacteria, fungi, viruses [are] squirming in earth and dirt\u201d\u00a0(Life on Earth<\/em>, 2008). The speaker of Nick Laird\u2019s \u201cFeel free\u201d (Feel Free<\/em>, 2018) similarly seeks to \u201cinterface \/ with Earth\u201d and while sensing \u201cthe presence of numerous and minute quanta moving\u2026in unison\u201d. In these poets\u2019 writing, such an imaginary of the more-than-human domain is also a prerequisite for a meaningful framework of environmental justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cInsurgent Spaces: The Many Dublins of Contemporary Irish Literature\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liam Lanigan, Governors State University<\/em><\/p>\n

21st-century Dublin has been defined in cultural, socio-economic, and spatial terms by a series of ruptures; the divide between the city\u2019s north and south has been compounded by a division between the \u201cold\u201d city in the west and the new city of the Docklands, for example, or the temporal division between before the Celtic Tiger and after. However, during the last two decades the meaning of Dublin space has also been contested by previously marginalized or silenced groups such as migrants and LGBTQ communities. Within the dominant conceptions of Dublin space, such groups have established \u201cinsurgent spaces\u201d that transform existing uses and meanings of the cityscape, creating new cartographies of the city and challenging our understanding of Dublin\u2019s meaning. Focusing primarily on Barry McCrea\u2019s 2005 novel\u00a0The First Verse<\/em>, this paper will examine how Irish literature has sought to map these insurgent spaces. The novel captures a moment of profound transformation in Dublin, including the emergence of new transport systems, the financial district, and the city center\u2019s cosmopolitan gentrification. However, it also maps a host of \u201cother\u201d spaces that emerge within this topography, including then-new immigrant neighborhoods in Parnell Street and Moore Street, and an LGBTQ subculture radiating from The George pub. In its representation of these intersecting cartographies, and in its transgression of existing ruptures in the city\u2019s spatiality, The First Verse provides a model for narrativizing the city through multiplicity and interconnection, challenging the economic and social divisions by which it is increasingly defined.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018The Battles We Refuse to Fight Today Become the Hardships Our Children Must Endure Tomorrow\u2019: The Troubles and Its Legacy in Children\u2019s\/Young Adult Fiction\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michaela Markov\u00e1, Technical University of Liberec<\/em><\/p>\n

The recent Ulster University research paper on the current state of the educational system in Northern Ireland reports that education in this region is \u2018divided and splintered\u2019. It appeals for vested interests of \u2018the traditional political blocks\u2019 to be reformed. Indeed, it argues that \u2018history, politics and ecclesiastical interventions\u2019 have contributed to the development of such a divided system and need thus to be addressed if an \u2018ambitious and radical\u2019 transformation, which it calls for, is to be achieved. Although not being its primary objective, the UU\u2019s report draws attention to the sentiment that unless the contentious issues related to the legacy of Troubles, are openly addressed, future will be thwarted. The current debate concerning the Northern Ireland protocol and post-Brexit Irish Sea border further attests to how widespread this sentiment actually is. It also illustrates that children and their prospects for future are used to justify the assumed call into action, as is alluded to by the title of the proposed paper, which references the signs that have appeared in relation to the debated issues. The paper takes the aforementioned sentiment as a departure point. It proceeds from the impediments to implementation of community restorative justice in Northern Ireland as related to the conflict the sentiment warns us about to examine how the urgency to address the contested legacy of the Troubles is communicated to children, namely in ?in fiction. While the discourse about\/of the conflict in fiction for adults has been widely discussed, the paper seeks to examine how the crimes of the past and\/or the peace-dividends are portrayed in works for children\/YA, as such remains an under-discussed topic.<\/p>\n

\u201cMedieval Irish Law as Alternative Justice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ireland\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ciaran McDonough, University College Dublin<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>The mid-nineteenth-century project to translate the corpus of medieval Irish law brought a specialist subject area into the public domain. The publication of the legal tracts across the second half of the nineteenth century, not only highlighted the vast amount of medieval Irish legal material, but served also as a rallying point for Irish nationalists, who saw another way to shake off the British yoke. This paper examines the presentation of the laws as, what Heather Laird terms, an alternative legal space separate from English law in the nineteenth century; how medieval Irish law was considered as a replacement legal system in an imagined independent Ireland to serve justice in a more Irish way; and, in an independent Ireland, as a means to justice when denied by official channels.<\/p>\n

\u201cPoetry, Prisons and Voices from Beyond the Grave: Some Thoughts on Sin\u00e9ad Morrisey\u2019s\u00a0The State of the Prisons<\/em>\u00a0(2005) and\u00a0Current Memoirs of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ruben Moi, UiT The Arctic University Norway<\/em><\/p>\n

In the questions of justice and literature in Northern Ireland, Sin\u00e9ad Morrisey\u2019s profound and painful concept volume\u00a0The State of the Prisons<\/em>\u00a0(2005), places itself in a long tradition of prison journals on the island, raises questions of justice beyond its own time and place, and overlaps with recent publications from the Boston project, such as Patrick Radden Keefe\u2019s\u00a0Say Nothing<\/em>\u00a0(2018) and Ed Maloney\u2019s\u00a0Voices from the Grave<\/em>\u00a0(2010). This paper takes its point of departure in some of the controversial issues of Keefe\u2019s memoir and Maloney\u2019s biography before attending to some of the parallel questions in Morrisey\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cThe State of the Prisons\u2019: A Historic Perspective\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Britta Olinder, Gothenburg University<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2005 Sin\u00e9ad Morrissey published\u00a0The State of the Prisons<\/em>, a collection taking its title from the last poem in it. In six sections, each consisting of six stanzas of six lines the reader is here confronted with John Howard, prison reformer judging himself ruthlessly. Although not explicitly, the issue is justice in legal terms, reflected in social justice, moral justice and spiritual justice. The subtitle of the poem is \u201cA History of John Howard, Prison Reformer, 1726-1790\u201d, a history told in poetic form and poetic spirit. The difference between history and poetry becomes evident as the historical facts in this case are loaded with poetic subtlety. Words and concepts take on double or manifold meanings as biographical data are placed in a spiritual perspective.<\/p>\n

The poem is written in the first person, in John Howard\u2019s own voice. Ill by the plague in a Russian field hospital in the Crimea he is facing death, looking back on his adventurous life and great mission but blaming himself for his fatal mistake in betraying his own son.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the \u2018Dim Coming Times\u2019: The Call to Justice of Ireland\u2019s Spoken Word Poetry and Internet Culture\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Charika Swanepoel,\u00a0<\/em>University of Turku<\/em><\/p>\n

In W.B. Yeats\u2019s 1892 poem \u201cTo Ireland in the Coming Times\u201d, he writes of the artist\u2019s work as the making of song in order to \u201csweeten Ireland\u2019s wrong\u201d. Yeats suggested that politics is \u201can effect of art, not a cause of it; that poetry instigates action, instead of responding to external events\u201d1. Certainly, the same can be said today of the younger generation of artists who attempt to \u201csweeten Ireland\u2019s wrong\u201d when one considers the recent rise in spoken word poetry in Ireland and its call for justice. Spoken word poets are no longer limited to open mics at small-time pubs but form an integral part the cultural hub of Ireland. These artists are, for instance, seen performing outside the D\u00e1il \u00c9ireann and on popular television programs on public broadcasters such as RT\u00c9.<\/p>\n

In line with these spoken word performances and the written poetry that emerges from them, the global development of internet culture further allows for immediate and worldwide attention to injustice. Spoken word poetry performances often draw hundreds of thousands of views online and gain further interest by being shortened and shared on various online media and social platforms. This paper therefore hopes to illustrate how current spoken word poetry and internet culture in Ireland succeeds in challenging the established social order. This will be done by providing an overview of the issues addressed by young Irish spoken word poets Stephen James Smith, Emmet Kirwan, Emmet O\u2019Brien, and Natalya O\u2019Flaherty. On the whole, these issues include the housing crisis, the Irish identity, mental health and addiction, global warming, and the effects of the internet culture itself.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cOut of the Lamp-Bestarred and Clouded Dusk\u2019: The poetries of Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen in Comparative Perspective\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Toms<\/em><\/p>\n

On the face of it, Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen are not two poets one might ordinarily put together. Ridge, born in Dublin and living in Australia and later America, was a modernist and avant-garde poet who was until recently all but forgotten in her country of origin. Nilsen, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Norway, though he travelled, focussing his efforts on his journalism and poetry. His poetry was popular and remains so. Where both poets intersect in their interests was their deep commitment to the class struggle of the period following the Russian Revolution right through the interwar period. In this paper, I will explore similarities and contrasts in the poetics of Ridge and Nilsen and the tensions in their practice between radical politics and a radical poetics. In doing so, I will attempt to bridge the gap between both poets\u2019 search for justice, across linguistic barriers, enacting an internationalism for which they both stood and suggest that though they were separated by language and distance, their poetry aimed towards the same goal.<\/p>\n

\u201cDivine (In)Justice in Charles Maturin\u2019s\u00a0Melmoth the Wanderer<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University<\/em><\/p>\n

In his introduction to the Oxford World\u2019s Classics edition of\u00a0Melmoth<\/em>, Chris Baldick suggests the following: \u201cWhen \u2026 Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an \u2018improving\u2019 work of fiction\u201d (xvi). The Irish context of Maturin\u2019s self-deconstructing project is decisive. The Protestant rhetoric only strengthens the Catholic resistance in the way it would in an Irish political context (applied power always provokes opposition). In the novel, the Protestant impulse that Maturin at least seems to be driven by is a sterness that only functions as a catalyst for the dissolving of distinctions that Baldick draws attention to. The Gothic outcome is a display of the only justice, the fate of desire. The sought purity of the Panoptic eye becomes something like the eye in Georges Bataille\u2019s\u00a0The Story of an Eye<\/em>: \u201c\u2018Put it up my arse, Sir Edmund,\u2019 Simone shouted. And Sir Edmund delicately glided the eye between her buttocks\u201d (66). This paper examines the functioning of (in)justice in Melmoth, mainly in its theological dimensions.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018A Map of Bird Migration\u2019: Redefinitions of National Identity through Transnational Mobility and Multidirectional Memory in Evelyn Conlon\u2019s\u00a0Not the Same Sky<\/em>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carmen Zamorano Llena, Dalarna University<\/em><\/p>\n

Evelyn Conlon\u2019s novel\u00a0Not the Same Sky<\/em>\u00a0(2013) was published almost twenty years after the 150th anniversary of Ireland\u2019s An Gorta Mh\u00f3r, the Great Hunger or Famine. Nowadays, this dramatic historical event is unquestionably acknowledged as playing a crucial role in the making of Irish national(ist) identity and determining the fate of the subsequent relationship between Britain and Ireland. However, the significance of this event was not made explicit until its 150th anniversary, when political manifestations as well as scholarly enquiry started to acknowledge the dramatic socio-cultural and historical consequences of the Irish Famine. The 150th anniversary did not only bring about a change in approaches to the Famine, but it also posed the question of the nature and role of remembrance in tragic historical events and the construction of collective national identities. In the field of literature, Terry Eagleton\u2019s seminally observed the lack of literary expressions relating to the\u00a0Famine before 1995<\/em>\u00a0(1995). Since then there has been a proliferation of studies focusing on the study of Famine literature, which quite often has included a variety of genres beyond fiction, poetry and drama (Fegan 2002). This body of literature and its scholarly analyses have often focused on the impact of this event on individuals and on Ireland as a contribution to the shaping of national identity (Fegan 2002: 5). A number of literary texts and studies have focused on the Irish diaspora caused by the Famine and its crucial role in narratives of national(ist) identity. However, Evelyn Conlon\u2019s historical novel\u00a0Not the Same Sky<\/em>\u00a0invites a re-examination of the role of the Famine and the Irish diaspora in Irish narratives of national identity. Conlon\u2019s novel offers a critical engagement with forced migration as represented by an understudied chapter in the history of the Irish diaspora, namely the Famine orphan girls migration to Australia as part of the Earl Grey\u2019s assisted migration scheme. This paper considers how Conlon\u2019s novel foregrounds transnational mobility and the transcultural migration of memories interconnecting nineteenth-century Irish migration with contemporary transnational mobility in the post-2008 financial crisis. This paper contends that the migration of memories, transformed under the influence of the present vantage point from which they are revisited, contributes to redefining past lieux de m\u00e9moire as \u201cnoeuds de m\u00e9moire\u201d (Rothberg 2010), thereby challenging inherited narratives of Irish national identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPoetry and \u00abthe Pencil of Love\u00bb: The Early Anglo-Irish Ekphrasis of Mary Tighe\u201d Charles Armstrong, University of Agder Although ample critical attention has been paid to Irish literature responding to the visual arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, little notice has been given to pre-Yeatsian ekphrasis in Ireland. This paper will look at two … Continue reading “Abstracts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":615,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-381","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/615"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":445,"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/381\/revisions\/445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs2.abo.fi\/nisn-conference2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}