New edited collection features essays from three School of English Staff

25 Oct 2017

The Vibrant House: Irish Writing and Domestic Space is published by Four Courts Press

The Vibrant House: Irish Writing and Domestic Space is edited by Rhona Richman Kenneally & Lucy McDiarmid, and features essays by Mary Morrissy, Adam Hanna and Maureen O’Connor.

'This engaging, subtle book uses many perspectives, historically and theoretically informed, to explore Irish domestic space. Two fine Vona Groarke poems frame the whole; five short spell-binding memoirs by writers and seven essays by leading scholars plot the course, as does Richman Kenneally’s excellent introduction on the spatial turn in Irish Studies. A beautiful “visual essay” illuminates the volume’s journey through Irish spaces from crowded to bare. Home: place of dream and longing, theatre of material aspiration and happy memory, locus of deep meaning, rooted in the earth, but also of confinement, hopelessness, and bitter struggle. The book never labours its points, but its creative disruption of given narratives in Irish Studies is not to be missed'

Patricia Coughlan, University College Cork.

For more information, visit the publisher's website