UCD Scholarcast - Series 4: Reconceiving the British Isles: The Literature of the Archipelago PJ Mathews

This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the British Isles. If culture is, as Wendy James has argued, 'adverbial' rather than 'nominal', what kind of cultural geography of the Isles is practised in the poems which draw upon the forecast's daily and nightly ritual of naming the sea areas around Britain and Ireland? How might this maritime and archipelagic imagination of the Isles be related to current post-devolutionary attempts to reconceive the British Isles, both politically and intellectually?

This presentation looks at the relationship between England and the British discipline of English Literature, whose origin, it argues, owes much to the state unification of Britain between 1790 and 1815, particularly informed by an anti-French-Revolutionary Burkean philosophy which was defined by opposition to a written constitution, and by opposition to the national.

The relationship between the poetic and the national is crucial to how war poetry is perceived and interpreted. This essay looks at Second World War (and wartime) poetry from Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and in particular at images of absence, cancellation, annulment and denial, to explore differences in each poetry between how the war and the role of the poet in the war are constructed.

Nick Groom's study of the union, The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag, was published in 2006. In this paper, he brings that story up to the present day by surveying the past five years of Union Jackery, from Gordon Brown's initial enthusiasm for new definitions of Britishness through ongoing redefinitions of the iconic image of the flag to the almost complete absence of issues of national identity in the debates preceding the 2010 UK General Election.

The emergence of four nations framework in literary and historical scholarship has helped us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the complex and overlapping histories of the islands of Britain and Ireland, while recent research into Wales and Ireland in particular has helped to make the map of our relations more fully comprehensible. But what is the relevance and meaning of the four nations context for womens writing in Ireland and Wales? What part does gender play in the interconnected histories of Wales and Ireland, and how are questions of sexual and artistic identity addressed within texts that imagine British-Irish history in gendered terms?

This lecture identifies finds evidence of a feminist reimagining of archipelagic relationships by two writers: Munster novelist and playwright Una Troy, and Welsh writer Menna Gallie, born into a mining community on the western edge of the South Wales coalfields. Both Troy and Gallie wrote novels that deploy plots of female friendship to interrogate the relationship between gender and national affiliation in a four nations context.

Among the many divergent strands of Irish and Welsh cultural history, one commonality stands out: the profoundly self-conscious preoccupation with nationality and nationhood. For decades, political and cultural thinkers have troped this concern in the spatialized relation between centre and periphery. This paper finds poets working on both sides of the Irish Sea strategically critiquing the exhausted-seeming dialectic of the centre-periphery paradigm, in their anti-deterministic deployment of deixis, the term assigned by cognitive linguists to words which point or position. The few existing studies of deixis in poetry typically presume on its unvarying functional effect: to situate and anchor the voice(s) and environment(s) of the poetic text. Interestingly, poets like Catherine Walsh and Zoe Skoulding, writing out of Ireland and North Wales respectively, call that assumption into question. Both these poets use deictic signifiers in ways which deliberately, arguably self-protectively, fail to fix their texts in a range of potential cultural contexts.