VIDEO: Book launch and conversation to celebrate “Seatangled,” the new book by Willson Center director Nicholas Allen
A conversation to launch Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled, which Willson Center director Nicholas Allen has published with Oxford University Press.
Allen, who holds an endowed professorship in the humanities in the UGA department of English, will talk about the book with Eve Patten, professor of English and Trinity Long Room Hub director at Trinity College Dublin; Philip Hoare, professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton; and John Kerrigan, professor of English at the University of Cambridge.
The event took place on December 3, 2020.
From the publisher, on Seatangled:
The island of Ireland is home to one of the world’s great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island’s coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.