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‘Ecomusicology’ is a developing field that looks to explore the interface between modern eco-theory and a range of historical and contemporary musical phenomena. Generated as it is by a country in which ideas of space/place and ideas of music feature particularly strongly, it is likely that Irish cultural history will resonate powerfully in relation to an ecomusicological perspective. The early work of Van Morrison is rooted in the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s, one principal strand of which concerned environmental despoliation and the need for some form of re-enchantment with nature. By contrast, the ‘Celtic Music’ phenomenon of the 1990s was brought to its artistic (and financial) apogee by the Donegal singer Enya. Drawing on techniques initially developed by family members in Clannad, Enya evinced a form of mystical Celticism which, even as it harked back to earlier versions, sang to a quasi-environmentalist discourse embedded within the contemporary style known as ‘New Age’. The essay will conclude with a brief description of the other areas of Irish music that would be amenable to an ecomusicological audit.

In three major book-length contributions to the field during the 1960s and 1970s, leading folklorist Stan Hugill developed a peculiar understanding of the role of Ireland and Irish music in the international shanty tradition. Born on the Wirral peninsula, 15 miles from Liverpool, Hugill was deeply influenced by the port's experience as a hub for the Irish diaspora. This article will examine Hugill's characterisation of 'Irish' elements (lyrical, musical and performative) within selected examples, and will suggest that this representation of Irish music as central to the shanty repertoire engages with a range of insights emerging from Liverpool's status as a key location within the spatial imagination of the Atlantic archipelago. © 2017 International Maritime Economic History Association.

Dublin is a complex, multi-faceted city-region which has in turn generated a complex, multi-faceted culture traversing a wide array of genres and narratives. Literary Dublin is widely known and celebrated; but the popular arts – cinema and music, for example – are likewise implicated in the imaginative representation of the city. Of these, the latter possesses an especially rich genealogy: a reservoir of images and associations accumulated over an extended period of time, itself based on an older ballad tradition in which the city functioned as an imaginative spatial resource for a diverse array of discourses (class, gender, nation, community, profession, etc.). Given the city’s continuing centrality to the economic, cultural and political organisation of Ireland as a whole, it is likely that Dublin’s significance will only grow as the country endeavours to come to terms with the extinction of the Celtic Tiger.

This essay introduces some of the themes and methodologies which might characterise a spatial analysis of modern Irish popular music by considering a range of issues which emerge in relation to one genre (punk rock) and one band (The Saw Doctors). The principal intention of this brief account is to highlight some of the ways in which such an analysis might proceed ; a secondary motivation is to test some of the standard assumptions of Irish Studies against material traditionally seen as less tractable, and thereby perhaps to mitigate the disciplinary hegemony which has traditionally ordered the study of Irish cultural history. The author engages with theoretical developments in a variety of disciplines, including Geography, Irish Studies and Popular Music Studies., Cet article présente quelques-uns des thèmes et des méthodologies propres à caractériser une analyse spatiale de la musique populaire irlandaise, en examinant une série de questions relatives à un genre (rock punk) et un groupe (The Saw Doctors). Le but principal de cette brève étude est de mettre en lumière certains procédés d'analyse ; il s'agit aussi de mettre les hypothèses admises dans les études irlandaises à l'épreuve d'un matériau traditionnellement perçu comme moins docile, et par conséquent de réduire l'hégémonie qui a traditionnellement ordonné l'étude de l'histoire culturelle irlandaise. L'auteur aborde des développements théoriques dans plusieurs disciplines, comme la géographie, les études irlandaises et la musique populaire irlandaise., Smyth Gerry. Place, Noise, Nation : Towards a Spatial Analysis of Irish Popular Music. In: Études irlandaises, n°29 n°2, 2004. Espaces irlandais : zones et marges, sous la direction de Sylvie Mikowski et Claude Fierobe. pp. 75-89.

One of the strangest developments in recent Irish cultural criticism has been the proposition that contemporary Irish fiction has reconnected with the spirit of modernism from a century ago. In an ...

Literary historians such as Tony Tanner have speculated that adultery, with its assault upon the patriarchal institution of marriage and its potential for family drama, is the principal theme of the bourgeois novel that evolves in Europe during the nineteenth century. Joyce's famous work was heir to the great nineteenth-century novel of adultery – a tradition which includes the likes of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873–77), Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867). An act of marital betrayal lies at the heart of the story, an act which Joyce explores in all its emotional and moral complexity. Other critics (such as David Lloyd) have argued that his condition as an Irish writer obliged Joyce to develop an ‘adulterated’ form of writing – one which refused the precepts of patriarchal authorship, and in so doing contributed significantly to the emergence of the cultural sensibility known as Modernism. This article addresses Joyce's imagination of personal and political betrayal as explored in both the thematic and formal aspects of Ulysses.

This essay offers an analysis of the classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows (1908) by English writer Kenneth Grahame in two aspects of its engagement with domestic space. The first concerns the representation of house and home within the text itself, and discusses how this representation is linked both to Grahame’s biography and to the wider politico-cultural condition in which he was living and writing. The second concerns the ability of fiction to assume a quasi-architectural presence in the perception of the reading subject, and examines the manner in which The Wind in the Willows became a sort of reading ‘home’ (with all the ambivalent values and associations that such a concept implies) for the author of the essay. The contribution concludes by suggesting a link between the image of home as represented in the text and that assumed by the text itself in the perception of the reading subject.