Digging the Liminal Spaces: Chronotopic Representation of Liminality in Seamus Heaney’s North and Station Island
-
Maryam Soltan Beyad
and
Ehsan Kazemi
Abstract
Challenging the established poetic idea of Ireland as a unified whole, new Irish poetry encourages a perspective toward homeland alongside with a corresponding revision of Irish subjectivity as liminality. Introduced by Homi Bhabha as a postcolonial cultural term, the idea privileges hybrid cultures and challenges solid or authentic ones. Moreover, this liminal rationale entails a corresponding chronotopic rendition, as Bakhtin intends to theorize it, whereby the notion of spatio-temporality assists the poet in rethinking the Irish identity. An archeologist shrouded as a poet, Heaney’s early work, North (1975), is an attempt to reterritorialize the Motherland while Station Island (1984) represents the deterritorialization of the land, a collection in which Heaney proposes an alternative notion of Irish identity. The present study seeks to show how Heaney’s aforementioned poetry collections manifest a transition from a patently nationalist reception of land to a tendency to liminal spaces. Hence, a critical juxtaposition of these two works bears witness to an endeavor to move beyond the solid, reductionist perspective of the unified Ireland into a state of liminality with respect to Bhabha’s idea of hybridity. Furthermore, it is argued how Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope can accommodate to the accomplishment of such a poetic project.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- “I pray sir, hear me: I am married”: Language and Sexual Politics in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
- A Changeling Becomes Titania: The Realm of the Fairies in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
- Queering Time: The Temporal Body as Queer Chronotope in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- Digging the Liminal Spaces: Chronotopic Representation of Liminality in Seamus Heaney’s North and Station Island
- Bodily and Spiritual Borders in the Parsi Males of Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag
- Guarding the Guardians: Fictional Representation of Manipulated and Fake News in Graham Greene’s Work
- Restoration Celebrity Culture: Twenty-First-Century Regenderings and Rewritings of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and his Mistress “Pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn
- The Contemporary South African Trauma Novel: Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008)
- Reviews
- Rhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux (eds.). 2019. Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, xvii + 274 pp., 42 figures, 33 tables, £ 80.00.
- Reviews
- Aaron J. Kleist. 2019. The Chronology and Canon of Ælfric of Eynsham. Anglo-Saxon Studies 37, xxii + 347 pp., 1 illustr., Cambridge: Brewer, £ 75.00.
- Michael J. Warren. 2018. Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations. Nature and the Environment in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Brewer, ix + 259 pp., 6 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (eds.). 2018. Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems. Cambridge: Brewer, xviii + 310 pp., 8 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders (eds.). 2018. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance. A Tribute to Helen Cooper. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 295 pp., £ 60.00.
- Rory G. Critten. 2018. Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Brewer, 238 pp., 3 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Catherine Sanok. 2018. New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, ix + 360 pp., 8 illustr., $ 65.00/£ 54.00.
- Pete Bearder. 2019. Stage Invasion: Poetry & the Spoken Word Renaissance. London: Outspoken Press, 210 pp., € 12.50.
- Kirsten Twelbeck. 2018. Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861–1882. Bielefeld: transcript, 438 pp., € 49.99.
- Marius Henderson and Julia Lange (eds.). 2017. Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age. Heidelberg: Winter, 500 pp., 48 illustr., € 54.00.
- Sonja Frenzel und Birgit Neumann (eds.). 2017. Ecocriticism: Environments in Anglophone Literatures. Anglistik und Englischunterricht 86. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 264 pp., € 32.00.
- Rubén Cenamor and Stefan L. Brandt (eds.). 2019. Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U. S. Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 206 pp., $ 95.00/£65.00.
