Recent discussions in Irish geopolitics have often been coded in spatial language, particularly in the recurring motif of soil. For instance, Ireland was the last country in Europe to grant citizenship on the basis of jus soli (“right of soil”) until the 2004 referendum made citizenship determined by the nationality of one’s parents (jus sanguinis or “right of blood”). Or to take a more recent example: one of the great dangers posed by Brexit is the possibility of creating a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This essay traces how the motif of soil has been central to conceptions of Irish national and racial identity, from The Nation’s famed motto, “To foster a public opinion and make it racy of the soil,” to Seamus Heaney’s infamous bog poems, which wrestle with themes of kinship, lineage, and soil. I argue that such spatial language must be read as more than just figurative and instead as revealing the material relationships between race, place, and geopolitics, which have been and will continue to be crucial to Ireland’s global identity.

This chapter introduces the essays of this book and historicizes why a book on race in Irish literature and culture is of special significance at this contemporary moment in the twenty-first century. The editors signal the ubiquity of the concept of race in Irish letters and the changing iterations of that concept, especially since the Celtic Revival. Irishness has been compared and even equated to blackness to serve both colonial and nationalist agendas. However, in Revivalist and post-Celtic Tiger discourses, the racial imaginary surrounding Irishness has also been silenced in telling ways. This essay connects the dots between these divergent histories to narrativize a critical position that aids a decolonial framing of the subject of race, Irish literature, and Irish culture. Such a decolonial endeavor is especially urgent at a time when fascist nationalisms and white supremacy are becoming key geopolitical registers. It is also a time when Irish whiteness is being scrutinized and when Black Irishness is gaining recognition. This is a unique moment in the history of Ireland, and it is partly because of the growing crescendo of cultural identification by a biracial population within Ireland.

From its earliest Viking origins, Dublin was part of a networked Atlantic geography of exchange. Throughout its history, Dublin’s place in world literature has been influenced by the shifting shapes of those networks over time.Eighteenth-century, literary Dublin, for instance, was determined by the gravitational field of London, while by the middle of the nineteenth century, Dublin would have become the point of origin for a transnational diaspora– an origin akin to a wound from which the blood is being drained: insular, entrophic, and suffering (in James Joyce’s phrase fromDubliners) from paralysis. Joyce is the pivotal figure here, insofar as he was to see how the city’s insular, embedded sense of place could co-exist with a generative sense of incompleteness, an awareness of the phantom limb of the global network of which the city was a part, capable of being sutured by imagination.That suturing effect would also, paradoxically, reposition what had become a peripheral city to the centre of modernist writing, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, with Dublin today one of the most globalised cities in the world, literary form is being once more reconfigured as networks shift and are again radically decentred.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the wide dissemination in Ireland of British popular literature (including penny dreadfuls, educational books, newspapers, and magazines) prompted an intensification of activities by Irish writers keen to preserve and support a distinct Irish literary tradition. Such activities ranged from W. B. Yeats’s efforts to construct a national canon centred on the folklore of an ancient Ireland predating English colonisation, to the nationalist vision of a new Gaelic Irish culture, predicated on Catholicism and the Irish language, promoted by figures such as D. P. Moran. There was of course much discussion, in this period, about how exactly Irish literature could define itself against British literature. Yet at the same time, even among many separatists, there was a very strong sense of attachment to English literary culture. This chapter describes the complex patterns of influence and resistance that shaped both British and Irish literature between 1900 and 1920 by examining some of the popular, periodical, pedagogical, and literary texts that were central to the traffic in ideas back and forth across the Irish sea.

Between 1780 and 1830, a highly distinctive body of imaginative writing emerged in Ireland, formed by and in turn helping to mould the linguistic, political, historical, and geographical divisions characteristic of Irish life. The intense and turbulent creative effort involved bore witness to a key transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the emergence of modern Irish literature as a distinct cultural category. During these years, Irish literature came to consist of a recognisable body of work, which later generations could draw on, quote, anthologise, and debate. This chapter offers a new map of the making of Irish literature in the romantic period, as well as introducing the aims of the volume as a whole.

This chapter is a survey of representations of place and space in Irish poetry and prose writing from the last decades. It focuses on responses in literature to the building boom that transformed the face of the country over the course of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, looking in particular at the work of Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Tim Robinson, Paula Meehan, and Michael Longley. It moves on to examine how William Wall, Donal Ryan, and Mike McCormack charted the changed Ireland that followed the 2008 economic crash. Finally, it examines how, in Northern Ireland, writers such as Medbh McGuckian, Leontia Flynn, and Glenn Patterson sought to reconcile old ideas of sectarian territory with a newly dominant understanding of land as an asset. Perhaps ironically, for a time that included such frenetic construction, the chief anxiety that can be heard in Irish literature from these years is for what might be swept away in the name of ‘development’

The failure of the 1848 revolt scattered Young Ireland leaders across the globe. Whether transported or in exile, they carried on their campaign in the only way they could – through their writings. Taking their lead from the Nation, many founded newspapers and wrote history, memoir and ballad. Foremost among them were Michael Doheny, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and John Mitchel. Mitchel’s Jail Journal and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) were strongly influenced by being composed in prison and in exile. The former became a seminal text for generations of Irish nationalists, who saw it as an eloquent and fervent denunciation of the cruelty and hypocrisy of the British Empire. Exile also provided the perspective to write on the Great Famine of 1845–1848, a catastrophe so great that it rendered most nationalist writers mute with shame and bewilderment. Mitchel. though, chose to deal with it not as an isolated and unprecedented disaster, but, in historical context, as the latest and most ruthless of England’s attempts to crush Irish resistance once and for all. His interpretation of the Famine as a deliberate act of genocide became the accepted view of many nationalists, in Ireland and abroad. The same period was covered in less vitriolic style by Mitchel’s erstwhile colleague Charles Gavan Duffy who put his main emphasis on the political failings and flaws of Daniel O’Connell and the idealistic self-sacrificing patriotism of the Young Irelanders. The apparent moderation of Duffy’s writings and the caution and compromises of his later political career led many younger nationalists to identify with the more rebellious Mitchel. Chief among these was John O’Leary, whose noble character and unflinching idealism made him one of the most influential of the Fenians. It was O’Leary who introduced the young W. B. Yeats to the writings of Young Ireland, and though the mature Yeats later dismissed much of their work as shallow and chauvinistic, he continued to acknowledge its enduring capacity to move and inspire.