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George Moore’s landscapes of return
- Cork University Press
- Chapter
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Several critical editions have recently emphasised the need to reconsider some of literature’s overlooked spaces – both environmental and textual.1 Two editors frame the project in these terms: ‘One way ecocriticism can and should widen its range of topics is to pay more consistent attention to texts that revolve around [. . .] less obviously “natural” landscapes, and human attempts to record, order, and ultimately understand their own relationships to those environments.’2 This expansion means revisiting canonical writings with an eye to their overlooked or neglected environmental perspectives; it also points towards reviewing the landscapes of literary works relegated to the cultural margins. In effect, such a critical reassessment digs to the etymological roots of literary geography, to a stratum wherein close study of the earth and of earth-writing become related, even indistinguishable practices. Indirectly, but fundamentally, it sets us thinking about the uncertain delineation between nature and culture, insofar as such a boundary might reveal itself through a society’s physical or imaginative connection with the soil. Agrarian spaces are among the most prevalent and most ignored of those ‘less obviously “natural” landscapes’.3 In Uneven Land, Stephanie Sarver notes how critical ‘focus on wilderness has left another realm – land more visibly transformed by human hands – unscrutinized’.4 Even the land most visibly transformed by human hands has lately received its critical due with the emergence of urban ecocriticism.5 Meanwhile, farms and farmland – viable literary topics from Virgil’s Eclogues to Wendell Berry’s essays – generally receive less scholarly attention than do writings about cities or wilderness. While Sarver’s scope is limited to American literature , the critical chasm she notes for agrarian terrain can be said to extend as well to Irish literary studies, where its presence is all the more George Moore’s landscapes of return Greg Winston 66 noticeable given the predominance of agriculture as fictional backdrop or cultural context. Indeed, from W.B. Yeats to Edna O’Brien, one is hardpressed to find Irish writing from the past two centuries that does not in some way link with the nation’s rural, agriculture landscapes. This suggests much fruitful potential for the confluence of Irish studies and an environmentally oriented literary criticism that has begun to appraise the geographical element in a number of landmark texts. To that end, this essay reconsiders one of the most significant agrarian spaces in modern Irish writing, George Moore’s The Untilled Field.6 Moore’s 1903 story collection was a centrepiece of the Irish Revival and a major influence on notable short-fiction writers to follow, including James Joyce, Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin. The book helped reinvent the modern short story form in Ireland. A number of its selections remain staples in story anthologies and Irish literature readers; the entire collection still finds a place in university syllabuses and scholarly discussion. Yet, from an ecocritical vantage point, Moore’s field remains mostly untilled. Despite a title that clearly announces the central presence and status of terrain, the book is seldom discussed in terms of the economic and psychological aspects it assigns to the land. In tracing the cycle of emigration and return through several stories from the collection, we can recognise the abandoned agrarian landscape as central to the interrelated projects of nation building and the new Irish fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Now, at the start of the twenty-first, Moore’s book can also frame a space for contemplating issues of contemporary immigration and the status of agricultural landscape in the new global Ireland. There is always some rhetorical risk that comes with applying emerging theory to established canonical texts such as Moore’s. Well into its third decade, ecocriticism – like its theoretical forerunners feminism and Marxism – still has to contend with the charge that it privileges contemporary political agendas over historical and cultural realities, whatever those may be.7 Glen Love offers appropriate caution but also bold permission in this regard: [M]emorable literature is not necessarily possessed of environmental correctness or rectitude, or even of any obvious environmental content. But rewarding interpretive opportunities often open up for the student or critic who chooses to read ‘against the grain’[. . .] of a text’s apparent or primary interests, shifting attention from the anthropocentric to the biocentric.8 Reading ‘against the grain’ can open up considerable new ground for critical discussion; at the same time, Love’s distinction between environmental and cultural ways of reading is echoed by Armbruster and 67 George...