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Ciaran Carson
Author(s): Neal Alexander (Author)
- Publisher: Liverpool University Press
- Publication Date: 29 Oct. 2010
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 184631478X
- ISBN-13: 9781846314780
Book Description
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson’s writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson’s imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson’s work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This is clearly the work of someone who has long immersed himself in Carson’s writings, and has an intimate knowledge of the contexts spatial, literary, social, historical and biographical which have shaped them. Propelling the whole enterprise is Alexander’s understanding of Carson’s writing as premised on a sense of ever-shifting, overlapping, palimpsestic frames or discursive spaces, yet grounded in the specificities of time and place. The effective balance which is maintained between giving the reader a sense of the big picture’ and offering close, detailed, brilliantly insightful readings of carefully selected poems/prose passages is one of the special strengths of this book. Through its comprehensive coverage of Carson’s proliferating oeuvre, its meticulous research and carefully nuanced argumentation, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing makes a significant contribution to the consolidation and development of theoretical and critical thinking about Carson in particular, and contemporary Northern Ireland poetry more generally. Professor Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, University of Ulster A model of its kind, easily the best thing on Carson, and one of the finest recent books on any Irish poet. It blends theory and close reading very well, and wears its learning lightly and stylishly.’ –Dr John Goodby, University of Swansea
About the Author
Neal Alexander lectures in English at the University of Nottingham. He is the co-editor (with Shane Murphy and Anne Oakman) of To the Other Shore: Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies.
