Contentious Terrains: Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic

This book provides a cultural and geographical history of how boglands (or peat 'bogs') are represented in Irish literature from the 1880s to the present. It aims to demonstrate that bogs are more than ubiquitous landforms in Ireland but function as a kind of narrative that reveals some of the potentially unanswered questions in Irish literary and environmental history. Drawing on a range of Irish writers, such as Bram Stoker, Frank O'Connor, Scan O'Faolain, Seamus Heaney, Marina Carr, Deirdre Kinahan and Patrick McCabe, Contentious Terrains argues that the destabilising and haunting capacities of the bog provide a space to explore historically fraught colonial tensions and social struggles through the postcolonial Gothic form. By employing a cross-disciplinary scope, this book examines literary genres of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction (through theories of ccocriticism, space, affect and gender), thus testifying to the pervasiveness and range of the bog's allure in Irish culture.