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.
Table of Content
Introduction: Preservation of the Other in Contemporary Irish Poetry.- Chapter 1. Between Detection and Deception: Paul Muldoon’sWhy Brownlee Left. – Chapter 2. Framing Potentiality: Vona Groarke’s
Four Sides Full and
X.- Chapter 3. ‘Lady Other, Lady Mine’: Freedom of the Materialist self in Sinéad Morrissey’s
Parallax.- Chapter 4. Poetry as Endurance: Caitríona O’Reilly’s
Geis. – Chapter 5. “Flurred and Flummoxed but Unbleared”: The restoration of the self and the experience of language in Alan Gillis’s
Scapegoat.- Chapter 6. ‘The Miraculous Flesh’ of the Everyday Giants: Nick Laird’s
Go Giants.
About the author
Wit Pietrzak is a Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry as well as theory and philosophy of literature. He has published The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats (2017), and numerous essays on contemporary British and Irish poetry.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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