The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature

The Survey, for Parsons, is one of the "many possible and actual starting points of a history of Irish modernity and modernism," and what emerges in the book is a brilliant and fresh analysis of the ways in which James Clarence Mangan, John Millington Synge, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett engage with such a cartographical heritage and postcolonial imperative.

Autorentext

Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University.

Klappentext

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, arguing that the roots of Irish modernism lie in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity.

Inhalt

• Introduction: Maps, Modernity, Modernism

• I. Archives

• 1: Archive: The Ordnance Survey Letters

• 2: Anarchive: James Clarence Mangan among the Ruins

• II. Scales

• 3: The Scales of Modernity I: The Aran Islands

• 4: The Scales of Modernity II: Ulysses' Encyclopedic Narrative

• Epilogue

• 5: "Accursed Progenitor!": Beckett's Abstract Landscapes

• Bibliography

• Index