Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland

Adam Hanna is a lecturer in the English Department at University College Cork.He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space and the coeditor of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary and Law and Literature: The Irish Case.

Hanna engages in a brilliant interdisciplinary examination of how laws, legal decisions, and constitutions have informed Irish poetry for the last 100 years. Essential.-- "Choice" A study that is important and powerfully timely in its sensitive tracing of complex socio-legal and literary terrain.-- "Irish Literary Supplement" This accessible book contends with incredibly difficult, dark and disputed matter at the heart of civil society and the politics of Irish statehood. It does so with flair: there are bravura stretches, especially in Hanna's close readings, but it is in its rigour and openness to ambivalence that the book rests its case.-- "Karl O'Hanlon, Books Ireland" This is a book about poetic justice itself, about how the acknowledged legislations of poetry act as conscience and arbitrator for the failings of laws--and their inevitable repeal. Hanna's scholarship has an ambition of breadth and reach that means it should be read by lawyers, historians and political scientists--but above all it should be read by poets and their readers, as an argument for the seriousness of Irish poetic engagement with the laws of the country, South and North.-- "Matthew Campbell, University of York" I was hooked from the word go . . . . this pioneering book develops a strong case for the engagement of poetry and law in Ireland. It opens up in a genuinely original and intellectually nuanced way the resonant overlap between legal, constitutional and ethical concerns in Irish poetry since Yeats.-- "Hugh Haughton, Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literatures at the University of York" Poetry, Politics, and Law in Modern Ireland is a major achievement. Combining the rigours of quite brilliant close readings with an attention to the various legal and extra-legal contexts that help shape the work of Ireland's modern poets, Hanna reveals the jurisprudential unconscious of the literary and the cultural after-life of the law. -- "Eugene McNulty, Dublin City University"