Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts

Contributors

Contributors ix Christine Cusick is Assistant Professor of English at Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. Her research explores the narrative intersections of memory and place and her publications include ecocritical readings of contemporary Irish poetry, landscape photography as well as place-based creative nonfiction. She is currently completing a study of bioregionalism in the work of Tim Robinson and a collection of creative nonfiction on loss and landscape. John Elder lives in the Green Mountains and teaches English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. He frequently publishes essays in periodicals such as Orion, Wild Earth, New Literary History and Vermont Life. His last three books, Reading the Mountains of Home, The Frog Run and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa, form a sequence that intertwines literary discussion, writing about the Vermont landscape and personal memoir. In 2009, he wrote an introduction for a new edition of Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Labryinth. Playing Irish flute is one of his delights. Eóin Flannery is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He has published widely in the area of Irish studies, on contemporary Irish literature, visual culture and postcolonial studies. He is the author of two books: Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture (2006) and Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia (2009). He is also the editor of three books: Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography (2007); Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography and Popular Culture (2009); and This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann (2009). He has also edited a special Irish issue of the journal Postcolonial Text (2007). x Contributors Jefferson Holdridge is Associate Professor in the English Department at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, where he is also Director of Wake Forest University Press. He is the author of Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime (2000) and The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (2008) and his essays and reviews on Irish and American literature have been published in various scholarly journals and newspapers . Forthcoming essays are ‘The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya and Panting Rain’, An Sionnach; ‘Landscape and Family in the Eighteenth Century’, in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (eds.), Yeats in Context (Cambridge University Press); and ‘Bleeding from the “Torn Bough”: Challenging Nature in James Joyce’s Poetry’, in Marc Conner (ed.), The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered (University of Florida Press). He is currently preparing a book on nature, landscape and home in Irish literature. Joy Kennedy-O’Neill is Assistant Professor of English at Brazosport College in Lake Jackson, Texas. Her ecocritical studies of literature have been published in such journals as Western American Literature, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Organization and Environment and The Journal of Kentucky Studies. The essay included in this collection was first published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2004). Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives in Vilas, North Carolina, and is a Professor of English at Appalachian State University. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Her critical work includes editions of Irish and Scots novels by Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier and Sydney Owenson for Oxford’s World’s Classics Series, and the edited collection Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000). A new essay on class and trauma in Paula Meehan’s poetry appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture. She is also the author of three volumes of poetry, The Body’s Horizon (1996), Beyond Reason (2004) and Out of the Garden (2007). Karen O’Brien is Assistant Professor and David G. Frey Fellow of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has published essays and reviews on Irish literature and theatre in collections and journals, including Irish Women Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International and New England Theatre Journal. Maureen O’Connor teaches at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She has been an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Contributors xi Social Sciences Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she completed a manuscript on nineteenth-century Irish ecofeminism, The Female and the...