Iceland and Ireland, two North-Atlantic islands on the periphery of Europe, share a long history that reaches back to the ninth century. Direct contact between the islands has ebbed and flowed like their shared Atlantic tides over the subsequent millennium, with long blanks and periods of apparently very little exchange, transit or contact. These relational and regularly ruptured histories, discontinuities and dispossessions are discussed here less to cover (again) the well-trodden ground of our national traditions. Rather, this volume productively illuminates how a variety of memory modes, expressed in trans-cultural productions and globalized genre forms, such as museums cultures, crime novels, the lyric poem, the medieval codex or historical fiction, operate in multi-directional ways as fluid transnational agents of change in and between the two islands. At the same time, there is an alertness to the ways in which physical, political and linguistic isolation and exposure have also made these islands places of forgetting.
Fionnuala Dillane is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature at University College Dublin. She is author of
Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (2013) and co-editor of
The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture (2016) and
Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery and Empire (2018).
Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland. Her previous books include
Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (2017) and
Noir in the North(2020).
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
Notes on Contributors
1 Iceland — Ireland
Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery Fionnuala Dillane and Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir
part 1 Landscapes of Crisis: Islands on the Edge 2 Neoliberal Memory and the Market
Financialization, Algorithmic Governmentality and Boom Fiction in Iceland and Ireland Sharae Deckard
3 Precarious States of Being
The 2008 Financial Crisis in Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir’s Siglingin um síkin
(2012) and Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth
(2016) Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir
4 Warnings from the Water’s Edge
Deep Time and Narrative Excess in Arnaldur Indriðason’s Strange Shores
and Tana French’s Broken Harbour
Fionnuala Dillane
5 Trauma and Eco-Memory in Sjón’s
The Blue Fox (2003), Eimear McBride’s
A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing (2013) and Sara Baume’s
A Line Made by Walking (2017)
Anne Fogarty
part 2 Politics of Island Imaginaries 6 ‘In this corner of peace in a world of trouble’
The Literature of Islands of the North-East Atlantic in the Second World War John Brannigan
7 Islands and War
Remembering the Allied Occupation in Iceland Daisy Neijmann
8 ‘Rise, thou youthful flag of Iceland!’ Moonstone
and Sjón’s Queer Anti-Patriotism Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir
part 3 Framing Heritage: Mobilizing Memory and Forgetting 9 Gaelic Whispers
What the Icelanders Remembered of Their Irish Past Gísli Sigurðsson
10 Hurling,
knattleikr and the Global Tradition of Stick-and-Ball Play
Paul Rouse
11 Trial Pieces
Reading the Viking Past in Contemporary Irish Poetry Lucy Collins
Index
This collection will of interest to scholars, graduate students and undergraduate students who work in Memory Studies, Transnational and Comparative Literatures, Transcultural Studies, Environmental Humanities and Oceanic Studies. It has direct relevance to Irish Studies and Icelandic Studies departments as well as to a general readership interested in contemporary fiction, poetry, heritage, and the history of sport.