Participants and abstracts

No Joyce aficionados would deny that, in the final analysis, Finnegans Wake exemplifies an attempt to transform the language of literature into a “waterphor” of the act of creation. This is why one so often hears that this is a work whose language has to be “read with one’s ears” and “heard with one’s eyes”. This makes sense because in Finnegans Wake Joyce was, in effect, inviting his readers to intone aloud what the “words” on the written page sound like when pronounced in order to give a voice to the main narrator of the story – namely the ‘chittering tittering’ waters of Dublin City’s Liffey River percolating merrily away under the surface of the printed text.
Besides crediting this view by exploring the way Joyce uses ‘‘onomatopoeia’’, ‘‘double entendre’’, ‘‘chevauchement phonémique’’ and an abundance of aquatic tropes to “glossolalically” disrupt the merely lexical forms and dictionary meanings of what his words refer to, this paper has two other ambitions. The first is to divine Joyce’s reasons for wanting to recast and repurpose the language of literature by making water not merely the matrix of his story but even the very Being of everything going on in it. What tacit or assumed ‘cosmovision’ is subserved by doing this? And how does the existence-affording hydrodynamics of a river – “An Life” – pertain to the lives of the people, communities, events and dramas generated from and borne along by it?
This paper’s second ambition is to divine what inspired Joyce to lend a voice to the drama of creation by ‘aquifying’ the language of literature. Without denying that Joyce’s sources were multiple and varied, I argue that – as in the case of Ulysses – early Greek mythology was most likely the main source. For corroboration, I compare the role played by the water of the Liffey river relative to the story told in Finnegans Wake with the role attributed to the aquatic divinity named “Okeanos” in relation to the city of Athens as portrayed on the East pediment of the Parthenon on the Acropolis. The parallels between the hydrodynamic allegory portrayed in the latter and the one Joyce exploits in the former are too striking to be fortuitous. So too are the parallels between the role played by the “thitherandflithering waters” of the Liffey river in Finnegans Wake and the one played by “ποταμός” in the cosmogony of the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus.

While research into the creative exchange between Irish modernism and post-WWII Caribbean literature has steadily increased in the last two decades, investigation into the related subfield of modern Anglo-Welsh poetry and its influence on contemporary Caribbean poetry has received decidedly less attention from critics of Anglo-Celtic modernism. This paper, drawn from what will be the first and final chapters of my developing dissertation Others at the Shore, seeks to address this scholastic gap and trace a chain of influence from James Joyce, to David Jones, to Ishion Hutchinson. Utilizing a synthesis of the archipelagic framework Brannigan details within Archipelagic Modernism and Jahan Ramazani’s Transnational Poetics, Others at the Shore evidences a direct dialogue and creative kinship between Irish and Welsh modernism, and contemporary Caribbean poetry. 

My research demonstrates that the poetry of contemporary Caribbean writers like Ishion Hutchinson negotiates both Otherness and connections to Britishness through oceanic imageries and an archipelagic understanding of political economy and history inherited from Irish and Welsh modernism. Moreover, I contend that contemporary Caribbean poets are attracted to archipelagic Anglo-Welsh literature because writers like David Jones, who are surely informed by Irish modernism’s decoloniality, craft poetry with speakers that offer a more comparable model for Caribbean writers as they constellate an otherized British subject’s position within the greater British Commonwealth.

Others at the Shore approaches “Global Ireland,” a popularizing current within Irish Studies, from the neighboring Anglo-Welsh standpoint. Anglo-Welsh writing is distinctive because, like archipelagic waters, it holds Celticness and Angloness in intimate adjacency.  Placing Joyce, Jones, and Hutchison into conversation, I argue that Welshness and its cultural proximity to Irishness and Angloness is especially attractive to poets of the Anglophone Caribbean, poets who similarly contemplate the sociopolitical friction between colonized Otherness and their own nearness to the literary cultures of Anglo metropoles.

The very title of this conference ‘Flux and Flow in Irish in Scottish Literatures’ conjures up the metaphor of the sea and possibly that of a river flowing into the sea and being subject to flowing and ebbing and also slacking and flushing as in tidal waves. And the phrase ‘Scottish literature’ implies the Scottish languages conveying ideas and emotions. This presentation will focus on the languages in use in Scottish literature keeping in mind that, not unlike Ireland, Scotland is surrounded by seas receiving the water of the nation’s rivers.

In this 21st-century, since the parliament of Scotland declared, in June 2025, that the nation is officially trilingual, we can no longer ignore that English, Scots and Gaelic are the three languages every reader is likely to meet in fiction, poetry and drama. This has been one of the major causes of Scottish literature critiques showing reticence about foreign critiques dealing with Scottish literature. However, willy-nilly, Scots, Gaelic and English eventually flow together.

The first point in this presentation will be a brief review of the history of the three official languages of Scotland. The second point will be the recent rebirth of Scottish Gaelic. The third point will be an assessment of Scottish Gaelic among European languages and particularly how “common Gaelic” Scottish Gaelic can be accepted and taught in France.

From Fishing the Slow-Black River (1994) to Twist (2025), water and its movements have been a recurring motif in Colum McCann’s fiction. The various states of water have often acted as metaphors for his character’s states and fates, and his novels and short stories frequently include waterscapes, which are spatialities that host and encourage liminal, repair and rebirth processes*. What also characterises the corpus is the mutating use of the motif of water – its flux and flow, and the consequences of the latter – which, in the author’s early works, plays a significant role (as a symbol and as a spatiality endowed with liminal potential) that yet remains limited to the scale of individual characters. However, in TransAtlantic (2012) and even more strikingly in Twist, the scale has noticeably widened, and the motifs and roles of water and its flux and flow have taken on a more planetary dimension with a focus on how water, and particularly oceans, connect or separate human beings whose experiences are rooted in international and transcultural realities. These novels increasingly openly reflect on (post)colonial issues and stakes, and Twist, in particular, engages in an examination of the entanglement between the individual and the collective by using the plasticity of the motif of water. This also allows the author to go back and forth between the metaphoric potential of water and its use and representation from a material perspective.

The aim of this talk will then be to analyse the mutational potential and the mutating uses of the flux and flow in McCann’s fiction.

It will first focus on the author’s early works and the intimate scale of the symbolism and the liminal potential of the flux and flow; it will then examine the shift towards a widening of the scope involving these matters, raising the question of the (re)construction of community and modes of communication through the flux and flow that characterises McCann’s waterscapes; finally, it will argue that what emerges in the light of this diachronic approach is the entanglement between the individual and the collective, the poetic or metaphoric and the material, placing McCann’s corpus in the wider network of literary texts that use and interrogate the mutations caused by and represented through the aquatic flux and flow.

* See Marion Bourdeau, « Waterscapes and liminality: a stylistic analysis of Colum McCann’s spatialities of rebirth », Études de stylistique anglaise [Online], 16 | 2021. DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/esa.4499

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel full of avian encounters, Stephen Dedalus looks up from the city streets to notice the ‘dark darting quivering bodies’ of the birds circling above the rooftops, and he wonders ‘what birds were they?’ The scene invites the reader into the realms of ornithology, but also into folklore, philosophy, poetry, and mythology. Naming the birds as swallows leads Stephen to think of their migration, ‘flying through the seadusk over the flowing waters’. This paper examines the rich associations of birds and migration over water in archipelagic writing, and in particular the ways in which birds become figures of liminality and oceanic connection in the littoral environment. Along the shores and islands of what Andrew McNeillie calls the ‘unnameable archipelago’ in the North-East Atlantic, writers have been drawn towards representing encounters with birds as an interweaving of the heterogeneous geographies of the human and more-than-human. This paper will argue that, written from places of damage and vulnerability, from the coastal fringes that have often been frontiers of ecological, social, and political failure, archipelagic writing offers rich resources for the work of understanding the histories and cultures of interspecies relations.

In this talk, I propose to use flux and fluidity as a research metaphor to probe into the  complex circulations at play in some of Emma Donoghue’s works. From a methodological  standpoint, what I call a « research metaphor » is a tool partly inspired by Silvia Kadiu’s  Reflexive Translation Studies: Translation as Critical Reflection, by George Steiner’s After  Babel and by my own research-creation approach¹ to reflexivity. It consists in a methodical  yet creative use of a metaphor to map out the heuristic space opened by a topic and an  author’s work, both in its native language and in translation. How does this prismatic lens  highlight both the complexities and the central motif lying at the core of Donoghue’s diverse  and prolific body of works? 

As a translator, I have worked professionally on two of Donoghue’s non queer-themed works, the award-winning novel Room, and Astray, a collection of historical short stories  about migration, betrayal, and wandering away from the straight path of orderly life. Yet  most of Donoghue’s work is queer and feminist. As a researcher, I will strive to explore the  fluid circulations in the works of an author who moved to Canada several years ago: as she  writes across literary and human genres, her novels are traversed by the theme of cross 

dressing² and travelling, both of which hinge on the notion of fluidity. Focusing on one of  her queer and feminist tales (A Tale of a Skin), I will propose an intersectional reading of  this intriguing rewriting of Donkeyskin. Is the main character of this tale, just like the main  character of so many of her works, a gay woman in disguise or a gender-fluid Orlando? 

Finally, I will share some insights on the challenges of translating Donoghue’s Kissing the  Witch – Old Tales in New Skins³ and on the potential re-circulations that can be unlocked  through this cross-linguistic and cross-cultural rendering of tales characterized by constant  shifts in narratological perspective. 

¹ Buhl, Virginie, 2021. La défamiliarisation d’une langue à l’autre : traduire la voix de l’enfant-narrateur en  français / Defamiliarization across languages : translating the child-narrator’s voice from English into French.  Thèse de doctorat, Paris 3, École doctorale Sciences du langage. Sous la direction d’Isabelle Collombat. En  ligne (accès restreint) : http://www.theses.fr/s154268 

² See Frog Music (2014) et Learned by Heart (2023), to name but a few. 

³ Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch – Old Tales in New Skins, Hamish Hamilton, 1997, HarperCollins, 1999.

Blue humanities and archipelagic modes of thinking about the planetary water is concerned with the disastrous consequences of anthropocentric dwelling on earth and aims at shedding light on the urgency of moving beyond metaphysical and Cartesian way of thinking about our world and waterscapes. In terms of literary archipelagic studies, blue humanities scholarship – combining science, philosophy, and arts- socially, politically, culturally, and historically engages with various aspects of real and fictional narratives through an aqua-centric perspective. As the idea of an “Atlantic archipelago” emerged as an alternative to the term “the British Isles”, contemporary Irish and Scottish scholarship have promoted new perspectives towards reading literature that flourished from the archipelago. The complex history, geography, and locality of these islands offer us a new understanding of the relationship between human and non-human entities, creating new archipelagic modes of representation. In my paper, I will delve into the archipelagic modes of being in Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island”, and the Scottish-born intellectual nomad Kenneth White’s “Walking the Coast.” I argue that the poets’ archipelagic imaginations of Irish and Scottish islands; rivers, lochs, boglands, rains, water-blistered fields, deep-blue mussel beds, and tidal breeze of fancy in their poems allow us to examine their works within the framework of Heidegger’s theory of the fourfold (Das Geviert). Heidegger’s fourfold offers an alternative to metaphysical ways of thinking about the world by showing the interconnected ways of being in the world through the intersections of earth, sky, mortal world, and the divinity to achieve what he calls “a poetic dwelling” within the unity of the fourfold. I argue that archipelagic modes of thinking and (geo)poetical dwelling on earth become intermingled ways of being and poetic expression in Heaney and White’s poems as both poets make use of waterscapes not only as symbols and elusive metaphors for the human relations but in a way that takes the earth and water as their centre, offering a new geo-centred cosmoculture beyond the traditional engagement of poetry with nature.

As the Call for Papers announces, the exploration of the pervasive influence of the flux and flow of seas, oceans, rivers and other waterways is crucial to understand several aspects that have become central to the academic debate concerning Irish literature. Being Ireland an insular country, this influence lies beyond any doubt, having shaped Irish culture since Brendan the Navigator onwards. However, Ireland is not only subject to a surrounding watery influx, for the country is (or has historically been) plagued with “a type of biological product of peatlands, […] a specific type of wetland” (Gladwin: 2016, 29) known as bog, semi-solid and semi-liquid.

The aim of this proposal is to gather these two aquatic Irish scenarios to understand their importance and transcendence in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890). Although this novel has been addressed from a mosaic of perspectives (from the construction of the Irish novelistic tradition to its imbrication with ecocriticism), the particular participation of water has been usually overshadowed. However, since the opening of the narration, the Atlantic coast of Ireland and the bog of the Shleenanaher embrace the collectivity of characters that will compose the story. Thus, the external and internal flux and flow of Ireland contribute to shape the structure and the outcome of the narration.

*This proposal belongs to the activities of the Research Project “Myth and Representation: Innovative Theoretical and Practical Activities in Cultural Myth-Criticism” (ANDRÓMEDA-CM Ref. PHS-2024/PH-HUM-76), of the Research Group “Poéticas y textualidades emergentes. Siglos XIX-XXI” (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), of the Research Group “Estudios interdisciplinares de Literatura y Arte” (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), of the Complutense Institute for the Study of Religion and of the Research Institute of Humanism and Classical Tradition (Universidad de León).

This paper examines the poetics of flux and flow in Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places. The River Foyle reflects the author’s experience of liminality, of being born on “the periphery of two worlds” (ní Dochartaigh 246), both spatially and temporally, and mediates the process of remembering throughout the narrative. Ní Dochartaigh employs the aesthetics of flow and fluidity in her writing to guide the readers through the memoir, reimagining the passage of time and reconstructing the boundaries of spaces. At the same time, the focus on the natural world blurs the lines between the genres of life writing and environmental writing, adding a more-than-human perspective on memory practices. Viewed as a part of the text’s memoryscape (Basu 116), the River Foyle is discussed as a border, a folkloric “thin place”, a liminal space, and a natural lieu de mémoire. Its construction in the narrative is mapped onto the depiction of the collective trauma of the Troubles and the novel’s representation of the North.

Barros-del Río, María Amor and Melania Terrazas Gallego. “Irish Women’s Confessional Writing: Identity, Textuality and the Body.” Life Writing 20.3 (2023): 473-490.

Basu, Paul. “Memoryscapes and Multi-Sited Methods.” Research Methods for Memory Studies. Eds. Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 2013. 115-131.

Ní Dochartaigh, Kerri. Thin Places. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2022.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26.26 (1989): 7–24.

Éisc Aduain(Strange Fish), the only play written by Irish-language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin, is, in many respects, a fish out of water when it comes to its place in his oeuvre. Sewell’s previous scholarship (2006, 2019, 2020) identifies the play as being based on the life of Russian poet Alexander Blok. This paper dives and delves deeper into Blok’s influence on, presence in, and resonance beyond Ó Direáin’s enigmatic script. In making its argument, the play is read in dialogue with Ó Direáin’s and Blok’s broader poetic concerns, as well as with the latter’s lesser-known play, Of Love, Poetry, and Civic Service, cited by Ó Direáin himself as the principal inspiration for his puzzling one-act play (Ó hAnluain 2002). The paper devotes specific attention to Ó Direáin’s and Blok’s aesthetic and thematic engagement with the river and sea, in their respectives plays as well as in their wider body of poetry. Additionally, it is argued that the play’s decidedly low-key setting, ‘cois abhann’ (‘by the river), provides an appropriate backdrop for the philosophical exchange between its three characters, wherein Ó Direáin’s internationalist breadth of influences rise to the surface – ‘reflecting shifting political, economic, and aesthetic paradigms’ (ULCO 2025) – particularly in the context of the 1930s when the play is purported to have been written. With a particular focus on the character of Herr Übermann through the lens of Ó Direáin’s and Blok’s common interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the paper views the play as embodying a concept of ‘transnational poetics’ (Ramazani 2015) and translational Elective Affinities (Goethe 1854) (Benjamin 1924). With close reading across Blok’s original Russian, Ó Direáin’s original Irish, and my own original English translation of the play (2025), the paper traces the flux and flow involved in the exchange of ideas across varying cultural, linguistic, and political contexts, culminating in Ó Direáin’s unique and underconsidered dramatic effort. In so doing, the paper speculates on the extent to which Ó Direáin’s choppy, contradictory work might be considered further representative of his status as a ‘Fathach File’/ ‘Reluctant Modernist’ (Aiken 2018) in the wider context of Irish and European poetry and theatre.

This paper examines oceanic mobility in contemporary life writing from and/in Scotland. Focusing on Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016), Victoria Whitworth’s Swimming with Seals (2017), Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State (2021), and Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place (2023), I will provide a comparative analysis that explores how these authors engage with the sea as both an enabling and constraining force of movement. In each memoir, the authors encounter the seas and oceans through various mobilities: walking, swimming, working, and drifting, both physically and imaginatively. These modes of movement articulate different relationships to the marine environment, ranging from intimate, embodied immersion to more distanced encounters. The analysis considers how the texts imagine oceans not only as spaces of physical passage beyond the geographical boundaries of islands, but also as sites that reconfigure metaphorical and emotional understandings of mobility. Adopting an intersectional lens, I argue that the oceanic mobility in these memoirs reconsiders the archetypal figure of the ‘wanderer’, presenting a contemporary instance of an oceanic wanderer. Rather than the isolated, Romantic wanderer, these life writing works present a self that is contingent on the writing of mobility, yet an ecologically aware autobiographical self, one which is entangled with the sea and non-human entities. By locating the sea at the intersection of freedom and limit, ecological transformation and gendered experience, the works examined contribute to new paradigms of mobility that extend beyond terrestrial frameworks and foreground the entanglement of environment, affect, and identity in contemporary Scottish life writing.

Set on an oil platform in the 1970s, Still Wakes the Deep explores the alienation of Scottish off-shore workers and invites a parallel reading with the rise of independentist tendencies linked to the debate on the ownership of the sea’s resources (It’s Scotland’s Oil campaign by the SNP), a narrative that can also arguably be read through an eco-critical lens.

The protagonist is forced to take a job on an isolated oil-platform when a Lovecraftian creature emerges from the deep and takes over each of his co-workers. The catastrophic scenario echoes the real events of Piper Alpha in the North Sea in the late 80s that killed 167 workers. The fleshy entity merges physically with them suggesting the interlinked destructions of the environment and of working-class bodies, a violent double exploitation under petro-capitalism exposed in graphic details by the Cronenbergian aesthetics of the game.

It also interrogates Scottish identity and independentist movements, both linked to the North Sea, provider of wealth and legends for the Celtic state. The voice actors who worked on the project display various Scottish accents and use Scottish dialect, which also adds the dimension of class and language variations hierarchy between the colonisers and colonised through the differences between RP English and local reappropriations of the language.

I would like to combine all of these strands to present the interesting aspects of the game’s lore and aesthetics through the prism of flux and flow in Scottish identity and the ambiguous presence of the sea, both a source of abundance and destruction.

The memoirs of Tomás Ó Criomhthain (The Islandman, 1929) and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (Twenty Years A-Growing, 1933) give an insight to the final decades of human settlement on Ireland’s west coast Blasket Islands. Charting the decline of the islands’ population from the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries they show the daily lives of the last generations to live on the Blaskets before the islands were abandoned in 1954. While typically defined as works of Irish social history, they are, possibly more than anything, books about the sea.

This paper explores the multi-generational perspectives of coastal and oceanic Irish waters contained in these memoirs, as a holder of threat, food, monsters and the lure of escape. Using both cultural and material ecocritical approaches, the paper examines how these varied perspectives influenced the transmission of blue environmental knowledge, experience and memory across generations of islanders. This includes transmission both intraspecifically (across three generations of human characters) and interspecifically as the characters engage directly with the Atlantic Ocean, its climate and nonhuman species.

Today, the waters around the Blasket Islands are protected under EU law for their important marine species and habitats – marine protected areas being a vital part of restoring damaged and degraded ocean ecosystems. The paper concludes by considering how these memoirs can act as a conduit to transmit the ‘remembered past’ of a more biodiverse ocean, and, in doing so, realise the current extent of marine biodiversity loss.

Since the late twentieth century, “Daylighting” urban rivers has become a popular term in the Engineering sector, indicating an action which serves to restore compromised hydomorphological processes, and aid climate resilience.   To “daylight” is to reverse-engineer the waterways which have been covered and alienated from the human and nonhuman worlds, driven underground, and culverted into pipes, drains and sewers.   The term is also of key cultural significance, as signalling a renewed appreciation for and recognition of the value our rivers, and our renewed attention given to them.  Restoration has become a principal goal of river management projects as a “nature-based solution” to water resource management.  However, these actions need to be considered as part of a larger restorative project which reflects an integrated view of our waterways as physical, social and cultural ecosystems.

David Wheatley is an Irish-born poet writing from Aberdeen in Scotland.  His poetry addresses the climate crisis with restorative language and echoes the tenets of eco-engineering methodologies.  Wheatley’s recent poetry explores the blue corridors of the rivers Dee and Don which encircle his adopted city and surrounding countryside.   His poems remind us of the life-giving and life-threatening capabilities of water by tapping into the repository of cultural knowledge in the varied histories of the Irish and Scottish Archipelago.  Wheatley’s recent poem “Secret Rivers” explores the hidden culverted sections of the local watercourse and how anthropogenic modifications to the rivers have altered nature’s flow states.  This paper combines recent research in engineering and hydromorphology with ecocritical practice and eco-poetics in order to reintegrate the material practices of water treatment with its metaphorical benefits.  This paper celebrates both the operations and the performances of water.

This paper explores how water, as an image, medium, and metaphor, shapes the poetic and autobiographical works of contemporary Irish women writers. By examining Cherry Smyth’s poetry collection If the River is Hidden, written in collaboration with Craig Jordan-Baker in 2022, and her essay “Catching Up” from the anthology Look! It’s a Woman Writer! Irish Literary Feminisms, 1970-2020 (edited by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne in 2021), I examine how rivers, seas, and oceans become sites of return, reconnection, liberation, and poetic remapping in post-conflict Northern Ireland and contemporary Ireland. In Smyth’s work, the River Bann serves as both a geographical feature and a place of embodied memory, decolonial reflection, and creative flow. Water also plays a significant role in the works of Irish women writers as a powerful force, particularly in Eavan Boland’s portrayals of rain and mythic tides, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s sea-soaked, bilingual mythopoetics, and Leanne O’Sullivan’s exploration of coastal mythology in Cailleach: The Hag of Beara (2009). The paper further connects these texts to essays in the Look! anthology, including those by Sophia Hillan, Mary O’Donnell, and Celia de Freine, where the theme of fluidity in identity, memory, and voice is deeply intertwined with Ireland’s landscapes and closely tied to gender. Using an ecofeminist and literary-critical approach, I argue that water serves as both an archive and a means of articulation in these texts: an archive of hidden histories and a means to tell alternative, often silenced, stories about place, time, and womanhood. The paper ultimately examines how Irish women writers, by writing about water, re-envision their literary heritage and their connection to space, time, and nation.

The aim of this paper is to explore how Scottish poets of the First and Second World
War deploy aquatic imagery to address and work through displacement, violence and
belonging in a distinctively Scottish way.
While the Great War is marked by the mud, rain and flooding of the trenches, or by
the ice and snow of the Eastern Front, the desert campaigns of the Second World War are
defined by thirst and dryness. In each case, elemental water emerges first and foremost as
material condition, with flux and flow appearing not as abstract tropes but as deeply
embodied experiences. As Scottish war poets shift to more metaphorical uses of liquid
imagery to describe life at the front and wider historical upheaval, they draw on inherited
European traditions—Biblical, Romantic, and Modernist—in which storms, waves and floods
serve as figures of violence, destruction, sublime disorder, or punishment and ruination.
Yet these hostile waters are persistently counterbalanced by images of coastal
margins, holy wells, lochs and burns. The paper argues that poetic expression is thus also
shaped by a distinct, though overlapping, metaphorical source, rooted in Highland and Island
waterscapes. In poems composed far from home, Scottish waters become intimate metaphors
of belonging, memory and reflection. Imagined or remembered waters may be comforting,
sometimes even clichéd, or unsettling as they render loss more acute or disrupt reality like
mirages. Yet they consistently offer an alternative vision of soldiers’ lives, and an
archipelagic representation of war that provides an anchor of identity, community and
continuity.

This study will analyse the omnipresence of water expanses in Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993) and their liminal significance for the novel and its protagonist.
The book is centred on Yeats’s favourite motif of the changeling, a fairy substitute for a stolen person taken away to the Otherworld, and indeed features many intertextual links to the poems of the Irish canonical author. The first heroine, Mary, is believed by her island community in Northern Ireland to be “away with the fairies” after she found the body of a young man on the beach after a shipwreck. The narrative follows her and her family during the Irish Famine in the 1840s to Canada, where the story ends four generations later.
This paper aims at deciphering the liminal waterscapes painted in the novel, from the lake on Rathlin Island, to the sea of Moyle on the Antrim Coast, and eventually across the Atlantic to the shores of Lake Ontario. The importance of water imagery in Away highlights the interconnection it consistently conveys in the novel: between two countries on either side of the ocean, between two worlds (the human realm and the Otherworld), between the living and the dead. In so doing, it illustrates Brannigan’s “alternative modes of connection, belonging and community” (2020, 82). The spectral dimension of this connection with the past, since Mary is somehow haunted by her dead sailor, while her descendants also experience the remanence of family history, is recurrently tied to water. Bodies of water in Away are intricately connected to stories of migration, through their liminal nature. This story of Irish immigrants to Canada illustrates on various levels the liminal process of migration: halfway between Ireland and Canada, between old and new, between continuity and difference, between tradition and innovation. Jane Urquhart thus creatively documents a transnational experience on the shoreline.

This presentation examines the role of the sea in the experience of loss in Scottish literature,  including the cycles and waves of grief and movement undertaken in order to process that  grief. It focuses on two fictional texts which take place in Scottish coastal communities and  makes connections between loss, the sea, and the journeys of literary characters whose  movements on land and in water parallel both their undulating grief as well as the movement  of the ocean, including its constant ebb and flow as well as its unpredictable and indifferent  power. The two primary texts examined, The Silver Darlings (1941) by Neil M. Gunn and  The Gloaming (2018) by Kirsty Logan, are vastly different. Gunn’s historical novel is set in  the early to mid 19th century at the time of the herring boom on the coast of northeast  Scotland; it explores communities’ dependence on the sea as well as their adapted existence  to it as people were forced, for example during the Highland Clearances, to relocate to coastal  regions. Logan’s contemporary novel takes place on an unnamed Scottish island and, with  elements of both magical realism and queer identity, explores the flux between the world of  human perception and the world beyond it as well as an island space in which “diversity is  valued in its own right” (Cuevas-Hewitt 246). Despite the differences in genre and time  period, both novels demonstrate that the “life-enabling spirit” (Blackstock 13) of water can  also be a force which takes life. Including an environmental humanities approach, the  presentation will consider how this dichotomy of the sea, of both enabling and taking life,  reflects the perception of the natural environment in the 21st century. Interacting with the sea  is part of everyday life for much of Scotland; it, similar to loss, is unavoidable, thus, this  presentation examines how the connections between the sea and moving through grief are  portrayed in the Scottish literary imagination.

Blackstock, Michael. “Blue Ecology and Climate Change.” BC Journal of Ecosystems and  Management, vol. 9, no. 1, FORREX Forest Research Extension Partnership. 2008,  pp. 12-16.

Cuevas-Hewitt, Marco. “Sketching Towards an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial  Belonging.” Budhi, vol. 11, no. 1, 2007, pp. 239-246.

Gunn, Neil M. The Silver Darlings. 1941. Faber and Faber Limited, 1969. Logan, Kirsty. The Gloaming. 2018. Vintage, 2023.

We rarely encounter seas, rivers or coasts in isolation. In the archipelagic environments of
Scotland, water is the inevitable experience of weather: wind blowing across the surface of
the Atlantic Ocean, rain blurring the line between sea and sky, mist amassing along river
valleys and mountain slopes. Being in such landscapes unfolds not simply beside water but
within a shifting atmospheric medium. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of the “weather-
world”, I propose that the flux and flow associated with water bodies are equally atmospheric
processes, shaping perception, movement and language. Focusing on selected works by
Scottish authors, I argue that these writers develop what might be called an archipelagic
poetics of atmosphere. Their texts repeatedly situate the human body within shifting patterns
of wind, mist, rain and light that move across coasts, islands and other open spaces. In these
works, weather does not function merely as setting or metaphor but as a dynamic power that
entangles the self, landscape and language. Together, these authors demonstrate sensibilities
attuned to not only as water-related motion but as planetary circulation interconnecting
atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic systems.
Bringing phenomenological philosophy into conversation with archipelagic criticism,
the talk traces how such writing dissolves stable boundaries between the self, land, sea and
sky. By foregrounding weather as a relational environment, I propose that these Scottish
authors contribute to an expanded understanding of the blue humanities – one that moves
beyond maritime space toward a broader poetics of planetary water and air. Such a reading
strategy approaches the archipelago not simply as a collection of islands but as a field of
atmospheric and oceanic entanglements that continually reshape literary perception, form and
ecological imagination.

In 1966, engraver Stanley William Hayter asked the Irish poet John Montague to write poems inspired from a series of six engravings entitled « Sea Changes » he had just completed. The poet complied, and in 1970 he integrated the poems to the collection Tides in the form of a final sequence also entitled « Sea Changes ». Beside their common interest for the marine element (« Wine Dark Sea »), its fauna (« Petrel »), its movements (Hayter’s « Vague de Fond » or Montague’s « Lame de Fond » and « Remous ») and the vessels crossing it (« Boats »), the engravings and the poems share a specific concern for nets. Indeed, each composition of Hayter’s marine series shows a tight network of undulating lines that can be interpreted as the ropes forming fishing nets, slowly descending to the bottom of the ocean or drifting at the surface. In Montague’s poems, nets occur through images of knots, lines, lattices and woven materials, but they are also figuratively represented through various forms of intersections. These instances participate in the poetic sequence « Sea Changes » in a desire for pattern, a frequent word in Montague’s poetry : « periodic rhythms of the open sea / upon which we balance and slide, / hoping for pattern ». The poems also explore the moving mysteries of the human consciousness, as Montague writes in his collection of essays The Figure in the Cave : « the real subject of the ‘Sea Changes’ sequence […] is the interior, the human sea, with its rhythms of life and death » 1 . By weaving representations and images, nets become an apt metaphor for the art of poetry, they also suggest an attempt at harnessing the subject, which is at the heart of Montague’s poetry.

‘A River Speaks’ is the title of an index card recently uncovered in the National Folklore Collection by Irish poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin. According to this folk belief, the voice of the river Sullane (between Co. Cork and Co. Kerry) is only heard on rare occasions (‘once in every seven years’) that always coincide with a drowning. The river here is an active principle, both a space of danger and a threatening voice (‘I am the river of death’).

This paper will explore the intersection where rivers in poetry become both voice and space. These rivers are personified, but the flowing nature of their ‘bodies’ and identities is preserved and explored as an expressive space for women poets.

I will analyse Ní Churreáin’s two-page poem ‘Liffey, Mouth, I’, published in Town, a fine press book about the city of Dublin recently printed by The Salvage Press. The lyrical I in this poem is the river Liffey, which/who is also a living, flowing, inhabited space (‘within me wild creatures swim’, says the river in the poem). It will be compared with Eavan Boland’s Liffey poems, in particular ‘Anna Liffey’ from her 1994 collection In a Time of Violence. Because of their location, both these poems bridge the urban and the natural. They interrogate tradition (specifically Joyce’s inescapable Anna Livia Plurabelle), but also raise ecological concerns over the ‘health’ of the river’s waters and the harm done by human interactions with its body.

I will bring other poems into the discussion to analyse how waters are voiced in Irish contemporary poetry and what spaces are opened when poetry attends to flowing bodies. By casting a look back at the productions of women poets of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, I will attempt to determine which connections can be traced with their poetic observation of the waters of Ireland, its seas, rivers and lakes.

¹ The full index card reads: ‘The river Sullane speaks once in every seven years. On the following day a drowning is sure to take place in the river. The river repeats on each occasion the following: “I am the river of death, and where is the man I must drown”. Schools Vol. 345:406 (Ovens, Co. Cork), Recorded from Mrs. J. Lehane, Garryhesta, Macroom’. Photographed by Annemarie Ní Churreáin [@annemarienichurreain] (August 4, 2025), Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/DM8ayc-sE6L/.

Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Requiescat” (1927) stages a reunion at Lake Como that unfolds entirely through aquatic space: the furrow of a motorboat, the liminal water-stairway, the fountains in the villa’s gardens, and the elevated pergola overlooking the lake. Bowen’s story, in which two characters confront a difficult shared past, uses its lakeside villa and the many liquid thresholds to structure both the characters’ movements and their psychological impasse, making water a central medium of encounter.

The paper draws on John Brannigan’s theorisation of archipelagic modernism as a conceptual framework focused on transnational geographies, maritime movement, and processes of “islanding.” The villa is read as a transnational space shaped by arrival across water that recalibrates the characters’ relationship outside their native England and Ireland. Bowen’s detailed attention to aquatic structures – the lake, the fountains, the water-stairway – grounds the characters’ psychological turbulence in a tangible, sensory world, demonstrating that the story’s setting on Lake Como functions as a crucial site for negotiating the flux of emotion and memory outside landlocked, nation-bound frameworks.

Secondly, employing Steve Mentz’s distinction between “the wet and the dry”, the paper examines how the narrative navigates the “wet” shock of unspoken grief and resentment and the “dry” performance of polite, reserved dialogue. The lake’s “luminous and oily water” becomes a medium for these unresolved tensions, embodying the story’s modernist preoccupation with interior consciousness. Ultimately, “Requiescat” offers a powerful poetics of water where the physical environment is not simply a symbol of internal states but is inseparable from them, demonstrating how aquatic imaginaries can explore the flux and flow of human relationships in a world where, as Bowen illustrates, emotional and historical currents are inescapable.