Marisol Morales and Juan F. Elices Agudo (eds.). Glocal Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
The transformations undergone by Ireland in the last decades have relocated the country within that liminal space of the local and the global. The country of the deeply-rooted rural traditions, the severely religious impositions and the fragile economic system became in the 1990s a world referent due to its unprecedented and impressive growth. However, the emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger and the recognition that Ireland had become one of the most globalised nations in the Western world met a dramatic downfall that has left the country (pre)occupied with matters concerning its re-positioning and re-definition within a wider European framework. The cultural and artistic productivity of this nation has also moved away from the topical insularity of the past, adopting more transnational and universal subjects, at the same time that it has struggled to retain its genuine values and its own signs of identity. For, in Ireland, the more this global progress has grown to be unavoidable, the more evocative the local has befallen. Therefore, the editors of this volume contend that the global and the local should be understood not as opposed concepts but as two ends of a continuum of interaction. Within this state of affairs, this volume comprises a series of articles that revolve around the issue of glocality in Irish literature, culture and cinema in order to disentangle the complexities that underlie this concept and which are inextricably related to the drastic changes experimented by Ireland in the years before and after the economic boom and posterior bailout.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Glocality (Marisol Morales Ladrón and Juan F. Elices Agudo)
Literary and Cinematic Addresses on Glocal Ireland
From the Anthology to the Database: Old and New Irish Studies (Margaret Kelleher)
The Ghost of the Celtic Tiger (Ruth Barton)
Part I: The Paradoxes of Locality
Eighteenth-Century Irish Authors as New and Elegant Amusements for the Ladies of Great Britain (Mª Jesús Lorenzo Modia)
Regina Maria Roche, an Eighteenth-Century Irish Writer on the Continent and Overseas (Begoña Lasa Álvarez)
Everything is Moving: Speed and Sense of Place in Elizabeth Bowen’s Novels (Esther Rey Torrijos)
Hugh O’Neill’s Splintered Identity (Munira H. Mutran)
Gendered Re-readings of the Irish Canon in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz)
Part II: The Move to the Global
“A Global Regionalist”: Paula Meehan’s Transnational Poetics of Globalisation (Pilar Villar Argáiz)
Seamus Heaney’s “District and Circle”: From the Omphalos to the Universal (Mª José Claros Morales)
Samuel Beckett and Aidan Higgins: No Intrusion Involved (José Francisco Fernández Sánchez)
“Looking East”: Medbh McGuckian’s Intercultural Poetics (Stephanie Schwerter)
Washington Irving and the Cult of Local Ireland in Oliver Goldsmith. A Biography (María Losada Friend)
Part III: The Turn to the Glocal
Glocalising, Globalising: Emer Martin’s Fiction (Asier Altuna García de Salazar)
Global Irishness Meets Global Culture via The Simpsons (Rosa González Casademont)
Beyond the Reality/Fiction Game: An/Other Way of Exploring Contemporary Ireland in Film (Guillermo Iglesias Díaz)
Locating the City: Dublin and the Consumerist Journey in Recent Irish Cinema (Abigail Keating)
Beyond the Local and the Global: ‘Bodies that Matter’ in Amanda Coogan’s Visual Practice (Aída Rosende Pérez)
Interviews
“My Loyalties would Always be with the Local”: A Conversation with Deirdre Madden (Marisol Morales Ladrón)
“Dealing with Themes as They Arrive”: A Conversation with Mary O’Donnell (Luz Mar González Arias)