Contentious Terrains - by Derek Gladwin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book provides a political and geographical history of how boglands (or bogs) are represented in modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture (1880s-present). Drawing on a range of Irish writers, including Bram Stoker, Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, Daniel Corkery, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr, Deirdre Kinahan, Erin Hart, and Tim Robinson, Contentious Terrains argues that the destabilizing capacities of the bog provide a space to explore historically fraught colonial tensions and social struggles through the postcolonial Gothic form.

Review Quotes

Gladwin ultimately sees the bog as a place where the contradictions of "modernisation" - from the fight for independence to the cheap money days of the Celtic Tiger - can be played out. The bog serves as a place where the people whose narratives do not fit the picture of national progress can stake a claim, even if only temporarily. This is why the bog is a "contentious terrain" - it challenges the status quo, the received wisdom, the blissful ignorance. The bog is a place where that which would be forgotten, excluded, disposed of can return to haunt those in positions of power. As both literal and imaginative terrain, the bog refuses to be seen from a single perspective. It is temporally, ecologically and socially varied. As Gladwin ably demonstrates, the bog insists on the complexity of the past, and its vital, ghostly presence in the present."--Ian Maleney "The Irish Times"