1 - Introduction: The Lie of the Land

Summary

Space and place are crucial regulators of our being in the world. G eographically, place is differentiated from space: space is abstract, featureless, indefinite; place is lived space, and carries connotations of familiarity, stability, attachment, nostalgia and homeliness. Place is, first of all, constructed materially, through processes of interconnection and interdependence. However, the meaning of place is an imaginative project involving the production of images and the creation of identities which epitomise the culture of a particular place. Place has always figured importantly in the work of Irish writers – Yeats's and Lady G regory's Co. Galway, J.M. Synge's Aran Islands, Patrick Kavanagh's Co. Monaghan, John Hewitt's Glens of Antrim, Seamus Heaney's Co. Derry, John Montague's Co. Tyrone, Michael Longley's Co. Mayo – and the writers, in turn, have contributed powerfully to the mystique of particular landscape traditions. In Ireland, place, culture and identity are closely interconnected concepts. Cultural identity has often been interpreted as bound up with place, whether through notions of local culture (the parish or region, for example) or through the more abstract constructions of national identity, which often invoke a supporting imagery drawn from a particular landscape (the west of Ireland as a source of true ‘Irishness’). In the literature of place, then, we might expect to find an account of the individual's relationship with a particular place, its landscape, history, culture and people. We might also expect such literature to provide a communal set of images to help a group towards ideological self-representation and foster a sense of social integration and identity.