Studies of Irish literary traditions have focused primarily on land and landscape, which stands to reason given that Irish writing has been so frequently involved in efforts to reclaim and reimagine a national terrain. But one could argue that Ireland’s history and cultures were actually more shaped by water, from the island’s situation in an Anglo-Celtic archipelago populated by waves of settlement, trade, and conquest, to its diaspora across the Atlantic and the seas of Europe, to its immersion in the expansive saltwater networks that mobilized objects, persons, and ideas throughout Britain’s maritime empire. The past fifteen years or so have seen an upsurge in oceanic studies and the “blue” humanities, interdisciplinary fields that study the associations between water and human histories and cultures, ranging from the sea as a symbol of otherness and geological time, to its role in and damage from transnational human movements, to its implicit offer...

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