Literary Archipelagraphies: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago

This chapter traces the emergence of archipelagic thinking in British and Irish literary studies, and investigates its theoretical development. As a critical approach it has consistently reflected devolutionary and relational perspectives, which acknowledge the discrete characteristics of the constituent nations of the archipelago as well as the kinds of complex interrelationships that exist between them, but it has been increasingly augmented by environmental and ecological perspectives. It has also found expression in an emergent genre of place-based writing that engages specifically with the archipelago’s islands and coastlines. I argue that such critical and creative productions represent an archipelagic-ecological heuristic: a reaching towards an understanding of what it means to be to be living in the midst of the environmental uncertainties of our time. Finally, I outline the ways in which archipelagic thinking provides a model for ecocriticism itself – one that might help to foster new, posthumanist perspectives on the human place within the planetary archipelago.