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12 | Peter Dolmänyos in various traditions from the dinnseanchas to contemporary engagement with issues of spatial considerations. Although that relation has shown significant synchronic variety as well as diachronic change, its relevance as a fundamental motif has persisted despite shifting economic, social and cultural scenarios. This prevalence of place in Irish poetry is part of a broader cultural agenda. Neal Alexander outlines this phenomenon in a neat summary: “[clonceptions of space and place receive a notably complex series of inflection in the Irish context: whether in terms of Ireland’s history of conquest and colonial subjugation; its longstanding emigrant diaspora and newer immigrant populations; the legacy of partition and competing territorial claims over the North; or the discontinuous but far-reaching globalisation of Irish society since the Republic of Ireland and Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.”° His concern is principally the question of identity, a likewise heavily involved concept in relation to Ireland, with a more specific glance at Northern Ireland where the question is more saliently entangled with that of place. He also refers to Scott Brewster’s observation on the spatial concerns of the particular historical context of Ireland,® with even more intricate relations when Northern Ireland is concerned, which has led to an increasing involvement of geography and elements of spatial theory in the examination of Irish culture and literature. Gerry Smyth explicitly formulates the importance of geography for historical enquiry in the Irish context in spite of its rather unusual approach as “such a methodological emphasis is curious in so far as the primary theme of Irish (cultural, political and social) history would appear to be not historical but geographical - specifically, the presence and function of a ‘special relationship” between people and place”? In the wake of the work of Edward Soja and others for an elaboration on this approach, he calls attention to the fact that romantic nationalism would incorporate this idea from the outset, advancing the notion of a profound and essential link between culture and place’, all the more discernible with island people according to Benedict Kiely.° Alexander points out the specific nature of this relation in Northern Ireland as “the conflicting but also oddly congruent geopolitical discourses of Nationalism and Unionism both posit a series of mythologised identifications whereby land and community, people and place are understood as mutually self-affirming entities." The emergence of geography and spatial theory to a significantly more prominent position and of constructive power in cultural discourse against and on the expense of the prowess of temporality and consequent historicism 5 Neal Alexander, Ciaran Carson. Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 13-14 Scott Brewster, “Introduction” in: Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson (eds.) Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London: Routledge, 1999), 125 Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 20 cf. Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 20 Kiely quoted in Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 21 Alexander, Ciaran Carson. Space, Place, Writing, 15
