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This article explores the consequences that the conditions of incarceration have on the linguistic make-up of literary texts that result from or reflect on them. Due to the island’s colonial history, Ireland has a rich canon of confinement literature, but – largely as a result of this very same history – these literary works have often been studied through a binary cultural lens, reinforcing what Declan Kiberd has termed the ‘quarantine’ of Ireland’s literatures, with English kept on one side of the language fence, Irish on the other. Drawing on Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan’s concept of ‘coercive confinement’ in order to include carceral institutions outside the formal criminal justice system, this article examines four case studies in which Irish writers cross the borders of language quarantine when writing about coercive confinement, focusing on selected works by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Brendan Behan, Seamus Heaney and Melatu Uche Okorie. Just as the conditions of confinement that gave rise to these works differ widely, so too do the literary strategies employed to represent or respond to these situations of incarceration. While Ireland’s literary languages have historically existed in quarantine, we hope to show that this linguistic confinement is often breached by Irish writers responding to actual instances of imprisonment. Keywords: coercive confinement; language; internment; prison; borstal; direct provision; heteroglossia; translation

Rather than reaffirming An Béal Bocht’s status as a parody of other Irish-language texts, Radvan Markus bridges the gap between An Béal Bocht as Gaelic satire and the postmodernism of O’Nolan’s English-language novels At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. The essay explores the influence of German pre-Romantic and Romantic philosophers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the language revival movements which swept through Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Markus’s essay thus places O’Nolan’s works in Irish into a productive critical dialogue with continental philosophies of language and cultural identity. In doing so, Markus argues that An Béal Bocht exhibits many of the same literary and linguistic postmodern tropes found in O’Nolan’s English-language novels: ‘An Béal Bocht should be regarded as an important precursor to postmodernism in exactly the same way as O’Nolan’s English writing is nowadays seen.’