Maintaining a Place
Conditions of Metaphor in Modern American Literature

Author Biography

MARIA STUART is lecturer in American Literature at UCD. Her main interests are in nineteenth-century American Literature, African American Literature and the cross fertilisation of Irish and American poetic concerns. Her current publications focus on the work of Emily Dickinson. She is editor (with Domhnall Mitchell) of The International Reception of Emily Dickinson (Continuum Reception Studies, 2009). FIONNGHUALA SWEENEY is senior lecturer in American Literature at Newcastle University. Her research concentrates on African American and Caribbean literature and visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary connections between Ireland and the Black Atlantic, and Afromodernism. FIONNUALA DILLANE is Llcturer in nineteenth-century literature at UCD with research interests in Victorian authorship and print cultures, Genre history and memory studies. Recent work includes Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge University Press, 2013), joint winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize, 2014.

Description

This international collection of critical and creative work offers compelling responses to the specifics of 'tradition' and 'place' in the face of the formal and thematic challenges of the modern at particular moments in the aesthetic development of American literature. Maintaining a Place operates also as a way of thinking about the legacy of key figures within Irish cultural debates about America in honouring an esteemed colleague, Ron Callan, for his unique contribution to the field of American Studies in Ireland. Pointing to the ongoing transatlantic influence exerted by the American poetic tradition on contemporary writers, and responding to current developments in literary studies by meshing the field's critical and creative strains the collection includes new poetry by established poets working in Ireland and the US. This volume will appeal to all readers with an interest in modern American literature and its continuing influence on transatlantic thinking and creative practices.