ABSTRACT In a 2004 article in the Guardian, Mark Lynas observed of contemporary Ireland that “Thi... more ABSTRACT In a 2004 article in the Guardian, Mark Lynas observed of contemporary Ireland that “This land has been mauled by the Celtic Tiger, chewed up by double-digit economic growth—and what’s left is barely recognizable.” Urban sprawl may indeed prove to be the lasting underbelly of the “Tiger”—a new topography of pavement that threatens to undermine both the rich natural history of Ireland and the legacy of Irish nature literature. Sprawl is growing faster in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe. Few people can afford to live in the center cities, leading to a huge increase in long-distance commuting and a congested network of roads, and the amount of urbanized land is expected to double in twenty years. Ireland is now one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. Irish drivers average 24,000 kilometers a year, far more than Great Britain’s 16,000 km a year and even surpassing the United States average of 19,000 km. The Guardian article quotes Tony Lowes, a co-founder of Friends of the Irish Environment and a vigorous advocate of tighter planning laws, as saying that we must “save Ireland from the Irish.” He adds, “We’ve turned our back on everything. The environment, the past... There are no victories. Everything is being demolished around us.”1 A sense of the contrast between the beauty of rural Ireland and urban ugliness is hardly new. One of the more famous expressions is in Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which bemoans the loss of nature within the confines of a paved civilization; the narrator’s arising and going is an attempt to take action in a manner that will bring that nature back. Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, this arising and going is more likely a matter of tapping into memory and imagination of what was than of actually building a cabin on a lake. In other words, the paved life will always be there, but it does not need to be consume our imaginations. Yeats’s speaker also concedes that those around him in his London landscape—and his Dublin landscape for that matter—were too removed from this type of existence to desire it. For most in these urban communities, the “deep heart’s core” is unreachable. The pastoral dream has been replaced by a preference for the practical, and those who have lost access to this deep heart’s core are too integrated into the contemporary landscape to notice what has been lost. Today, places that existed well beyond the urban roads and neighborhoods are being lost to memories and childhoods forever. The lake to which Yeats’s narrator wishes to return has survived as a much-visited tourist destination— perhaps the one thing that has kept it preserved from urban development. Nature has become reduced to a footnote, a lost dream that fades with each subsequent reduction of the natural world. Yeats, in his autobiography, ruminates on this poem: “I grew suddenly oppressed,” he said, “at the great weight of stone and thought, ‘There are miles and miles of stone and brick all round me.. if John the Baptist or his like were to come again, and had his mind set upon it, he could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their buildings empty’”.2 Given the urgency of Ireland’s environmental status, and the longstanding construction of Ireland as a uniquely “green” place, one might expect an environmental sensibility to be a feature of Irish literary studies. But the analysis of Ireland’s most prominent writers has rarely focused on their observations of the natural world. As John Wilson Foster notes, “Irish nature writing has been sadly neglected, and there is none represented in the three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing”3 The 1991 anthology examines the various traditions of Irish writing in a chronology dating from early Christian times to the present, a thorough compendium of writing. Since Foster’s observations about the dearth of nature writing, the anthology has been expanded to include two volumes on Irish women’s writing, but still fails to address the plethora of Irish writers whose...
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011
... Poets of Northern Irelandand their connection to Ireland&#x2... more ... Poets of Northern Irelandand their connection to Ireland's wild west coast-are examined in Chapter 5, including Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley and explores the redemptive sentiment implicit in their nature poetry. ...
This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---sp... more This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---specifically through the urban sprawl of northern New Jersey. The paper begins and ends with analysis of local New Jersey poets, and in between examines the psychological effect of removing nature from the life of Tony Soprano, and the sudden entry into nature for Paulie and Chris in The Pine Barrens.
Like Voltaire's proclamation that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, s... more Like Voltaire's proclamation that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, so too is the case with history: if the past is not recorded, it becomes necessary for a culture to partake in a narrative that invents (or re-invents) it. In this way, history becomes am imagined one, woven into the tapestry of the culture through storytelling and oral tradition and fortified by subsequent generations who re-tell, re-invent, re-imagine. This is the particular case of the Irish, who, faced with the absence of any substantive written history of their Celtic past, resorted to the fertile ground of imagination from which to paint the blank canvas of the past. In Yeats' poem "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea" the Celtic Irish hero Cuchulain, so prominent in Celtic oral tradition, leaves his wife Emer and goes off with a younger woman; Emer trains their son to be a hero to one day avenge her right and appease her anger, knowing full well that when Cuchulain and...
Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natur... more Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. The anthology begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, but also the poetry of many others, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four of the anthology shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.
this paper examines the evolution of the Irish-American drunk stereotype from early 20th century ... more this paper examines the evolution of the Irish-American drunk stereotype from early 20th century representations of Irish drunks to William Kennedy's Ironweed, the short fiction of T.C. Boyle, and Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. This paper was published in The Recorder: A Journal of the Irish American Historical Society
This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---sp... more This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---specifically through the urban sprawl of northern New Jersey. The paper begins and ends with analysis of local New Jersey poets, and in between examines the psychological effect of removing nature from the life of Tony Soprano, and the sudden entry into nature for Paulie and Chris in The Pine Barrens.
Compares the early nature poetry of Philip Freneau, with the influence of Native American views o... more Compares the early nature poetry of Philip Freneau, with the influence of Native American views of nature, in producing the first distinctly American view, from the colonists' perspective, of the natural world
ABSTRACT In a 2004 article in the Guardian, Mark Lynas observed of contemporary Ireland that “Thi... more ABSTRACT In a 2004 article in the Guardian, Mark Lynas observed of contemporary Ireland that “This land has been mauled by the Celtic Tiger, chewed up by double-digit economic growth—and what’s left is barely recognizable.” Urban sprawl may indeed prove to be the lasting underbelly of the “Tiger”—a new topography of pavement that threatens to undermine both the rich natural history of Ireland and the legacy of Irish nature literature. Sprawl is growing faster in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe. Few people can afford to live in the center cities, leading to a huge increase in long-distance commuting and a congested network of roads, and the amount of urbanized land is expected to double in twenty years. Ireland is now one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. Irish drivers average 24,000 kilometers a year, far more than Great Britain’s 16,000 km a year and even surpassing the United States average of 19,000 km. The Guardian article quotes Tony Lowes, a co-founder of Friends of the Irish Environment and a vigorous advocate of tighter planning laws, as saying that we must “save Ireland from the Irish.” He adds, “We’ve turned our back on everything. The environment, the past... There are no victories. Everything is being demolished around us.”1 A sense of the contrast between the beauty of rural Ireland and urban ugliness is hardly new. One of the more famous expressions is in Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which bemoans the loss of nature within the confines of a paved civilization; the narrator’s arising and going is an attempt to take action in a manner that will bring that nature back. Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, this arising and going is more likely a matter of tapping into memory and imagination of what was than of actually building a cabin on a lake. In other words, the paved life will always be there, but it does not need to be consume our imaginations. Yeats’s speaker also concedes that those around him in his London landscape—and his Dublin landscape for that matter—were too removed from this type of existence to desire it. For most in these urban communities, the “deep heart’s core” is unreachable. The pastoral dream has been replaced by a preference for the practical, and those who have lost access to this deep heart’s core are too integrated into the contemporary landscape to notice what has been lost. Today, places that existed well beyond the urban roads and neighborhoods are being lost to memories and childhoods forever. The lake to which Yeats’s narrator wishes to return has survived as a much-visited tourist destination— perhaps the one thing that has kept it preserved from urban development. Nature has become reduced to a footnote, a lost dream that fades with each subsequent reduction of the natural world. Yeats, in his autobiography, ruminates on this poem: “I grew suddenly oppressed,” he said, “at the great weight of stone and thought, ‘There are miles and miles of stone and brick all round me.. if John the Baptist or his like were to come again, and had his mind set upon it, he could make all these people go out into some wilderness leaving their buildings empty’”.2 Given the urgency of Ireland’s environmental status, and the longstanding construction of Ireland as a uniquely “green” place, one might expect an environmental sensibility to be a feature of Irish literary studies. But the analysis of Ireland’s most prominent writers has rarely focused on their observations of the natural world. As John Wilson Foster notes, “Irish nature writing has been sadly neglected, and there is none represented in the three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing”3 The 1991 anthology examines the various traditions of Irish writing in a chronology dating from early Christian times to the present, a thorough compendium of writing. Since Foster’s observations about the dearth of nature writing, the anthology has been expanded to include two volumes on Irish women’s writing, but still fails to address the plethora of Irish writers whose...
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011
... Poets of Northern Irelandand their connection to Ireland&#x2... more ... Poets of Northern Irelandand their connection to Ireland's wild west coast-are examined in Chapter 5, including Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley and explores the redemptive sentiment implicit in their nature poetry. ...
This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---sp... more This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---specifically through the urban sprawl of northern New Jersey. The paper begins and ends with analysis of local New Jersey poets, and in between examines the psychological effect of removing nature from the life of Tony Soprano, and the sudden entry into nature for Paulie and Chris in The Pine Barrens.
Like Voltaire's proclamation that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, s... more Like Voltaire's proclamation that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, so too is the case with history: if the past is not recorded, it becomes necessary for a culture to partake in a narrative that invents (or re-invents) it. In this way, history becomes am imagined one, woven into the tapestry of the culture through storytelling and oral tradition and fortified by subsequent generations who re-tell, re-invent, re-imagine. This is the particular case of the Irish, who, faced with the absence of any substantive written history of their Celtic past, resorted to the fertile ground of imagination from which to paint the blank canvas of the past. In Yeats' poem "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea" the Celtic Irish hero Cuchulain, so prominent in Celtic oral tradition, leaves his wife Emer and goes off with a younger woman; Emer trains their son to be a hero to one day avenge her right and appease her anger, knowing full well that when Cuchulain and...
Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natur... more Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. The anthology begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, but also the poetry of many others, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four of the anthology shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.
this paper examines the evolution of the Irish-American drunk stereotype from early 20th century ... more this paper examines the evolution of the Irish-American drunk stereotype from early 20th century representations of Irish drunks to William Kennedy's Ironweed, the short fiction of T.C. Boyle, and Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. This paper was published in The Recorder: A Journal of the Irish American Historical Society
This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---sp... more This paper examines ecopsychology and the impact of removing nature from everyday experience---specifically through the urban sprawl of northern New Jersey. The paper begins and ends with analysis of local New Jersey poets, and in between examines the psychological effect of removing nature from the life of Tony Soprano, and the sudden entry into nature for Paulie and Chris in The Pine Barrens.
Compares the early nature poetry of Philip Freneau, with the influence of Native American views o... more Compares the early nature poetry of Philip Freneau, with the influence of Native American views of nature, in producing the first distinctly American view, from the colonists' perspective, of the natural world
This paper examines "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins through both an ornithological and m... more This paper examines "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins through both an ornithological and mystical analysis, combining an objective, scientific view with a subjective, religious one
This paper will analyze the motives and creative output of men who chose not to fight during Worl... more This paper will analyze the motives and creative output of men who chose not to fight during World War II, establishing instead, through words, the groundwork that would become the pacifist movement of the Vietnam War that led to the current long hiatus of major world conflicts, with the driving forces of William Everson’s and William Stafford’s writing ultimately leading to the Beat poets, the hippie movement, and the fierce resistance against the Vietnam war. The paper analyzes the role of the work camps, including the creative force that came out of the camp in Oregon where Everson was placed, and Stafford's memoir Down in My Heart, which chronicles his time in work camps during the war, as well as an analysis of both writers' works.
This paper covers works of literature pertaining to forests, the spirituality and secrecy of thos... more This paper covers works of literature pertaining to forests, the spirituality and secrecy of those forests, in works of Irish and British literature, including the early Irish nature poets, the lais of Marie de France, Shakespeare's pastoral comedies, Pope's "Winsdor Forest," the Gothic and distant forests of the Romantic and Victorian periods, the decimated forests of Auden and of the Battle of the Somme in David Jones epic poem "In Parenthesis," and the postmodern sense of forests in Charlotte Mew's "The Trees are Down," as well as efforts toward reforestation in maintaining this vital connection between humanity and the trees.
The rise in ecocrtical studies of literature is really a way of understanding humanity through na... more The rise in ecocrtical studies of literature is really a way of understanding humanity through nature, but with the development of civilization, this has somehow been forgotten, or at least relegated to the realm of the unconscious. As Cheryl Glotfelty notes, " all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it "
This paper will analyze the role of the forest in three lais of Marie de France: Lanval, Chevrefoil, and Bisclavret, emphasizing the significance of the natural world and the forest that must be kept secret, and as a place where humanity is restored out of a pagan, pre-Christian past
This paper examines the three primary sources of the Common Raven, Common Nightingale, and Common... more This paper examines the three primary sources of the Common Raven, Common Nightingale, and Common Kestrel from ornithological observation and applies these observations to an understanding of Poe's "The Raven," Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," and Hopkin's "The Windhover." Central to the analysis is the idea of consilience, the unity of knowledge connecting science and the humanities, first put forth by William Whewell and expanded by the scientist E.O. Wilson.
Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature' analyzes a wide range of Irish literatur... more Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature' analyzes a wide range of Irish literature whose themes tie into a reverence for the natural world of Ireland. From an ecocritical perspective, these works, tied into an understanding of the landscape and particular aspects of nature, attain a fresh new meaning and foster a more relevant reflection of Ireland's beautiful literary landscape. The analysis begins with the first Irish writers, the hermit poets, and examines the ways in which the Irish hermit and saint were connected spiritually, through both pagan and early Christian values, to the natural world. The book then examines Irish literature from the perspective of the deforested landscape and the landscapes of farmland, divided property, famine, ruins, and a threatening natural world. Following the Famine, the book moves on to explore the establishment of the pastoral dream in this loss of landscape, and a re- connection to nature through the writers of the 'Irish Literary Renaissance'. From there, the analysis shifts to the nature writing of Ireland's islands, including nature and community on Achill Island, storytelling on the Aran Islands, exile in nature on Skellig Michael, and the mythmaking of the Great Blasket Island. Moving north and into the twentieth century, Emerald Green focuses on four nature poets from Northern Ireland: Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley; all four are redeemed by nature through their returns to the rural landscape of Ireland's west coast. The book concludes with an examination of modern Irish environmental writers and naturalist poets, as well as journalists weighing in on current environmental concerns in Ireland. 'Emerald Green' concludes with an assessment of the future of nature in Ireland, and how the significant reduction of this country's natural landscape will alter its literary landscape as well.
Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature, 2019
Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natur... more Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. The anthology begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, but also the poetry of many others, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four of the anthology shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.
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This paper will analyze the role of the forest in three lais of Marie de France: Lanval, Chevrefoil, and Bisclavret, emphasizing the significance of the natural world and the forest that must be kept secret, and as a place where humanity is restored out of a pagan, pre-Christian past