Chapter 6 - Political Ecology in Nationalist Literature, 1880–1922

Summary

This chapter argues that the agricultural and human disaster of the Great Irish Famine, and its broader cultural interpretation as a preventable tragedy, catalyzed an eco-nationalist consciousness within Irish political and literary circles. Literary landscapes functioned as tools of cultural preservation as well as a means through which a new Ireland might be constructed. Justin Dolan Stover demonstrates how this included political platforms that identified land ownership, agricultural self-sufficiency, and conservation as prerogatives of a politically independent state. The chapter argues that political writing and literary ecology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland often shared multifaceted concerns within anticolonial discourse.