A History of Irish Literature and the Environment

Malcolm Sen teaches in the Department of English at UMass Amherst. He is the author of Unnatural Disasters: Irish Literature, Climate Change and Sovereignty (2022). His research interests include the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies; he is especially interested in changing conceptions of sovereignty in the twenty-first century. Sen has published numerous articles and book chapters in these areas.

Introduction: Culture, climate, capital, and contagion Malcolm Sen; 1. Landscape and literature in medieval Ireland Amy C. Mulligan; 2. The gaelic annals and climate, 431–1649 CE Francis Ludlow and Conor Kostick; 3. The environmental vocabulary of Irish folklore Bairbre Ní Fhloinn; 4. Arboreal landscapes and the construction of Ireland Anna Pilz; 5. Famine and ecology, 1750–1900 Margaret Kelleher; 6. Political ecology in nationalist literature, 1880–1922 Justin Dolan Stover; 7. Solastalgic modernism and the West in Irish literature (1900–1950) Katherine O'Callaghan; 8. The ecology of the Irish big house (1900–1950) Kelly Sullivan; 9. Refuge and domestic space in northern Irish poetry (c1940 to the present) Adam Hanna; 10. Irish travellers, the environment, and literature Mary Burke; 11. The oceanic imaginaries of modern Irish writing John Brannigan; 12. Landscape in Irish language literature: poetry and prose (1900–2000) Louis De Paor; 13. Poetry and place Eric Falci; 14. Animals and climate crisis in Irish poetry Katherine Kirkpatrick; 15. Animals and animality in Irish fiction Maureen O'Connor; 16. The political ecology of food and hunger (1950-present) Miriam Mara; 17. Built environments and lived ecologies in contemporary Irish poetry, 1998-present Julia C. Obert and Nolan Goetzinger; 18. Transnationalism and environment in contemporary Irish literature Christine Cusick; 19. Energy futures in contemporary Irish fiction Sharae Deckard; 20. An ordinary crisis: SARS CoV-2 and Irish studies Malcolm Sen.