Modern Afterlives of Old Irish Travel Narratives

Natalia I. Petrovskaia holds MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is Assistant Professor in Celtic at Utrecht University. Her recent publications include This is Not a Grail Romance. Understanding Historia Peredur vab Efrawc (University of Wales Press, 2023).

• ContentsAcknowledgementsFigures and TableAbbreviations1 Introduction: These Are the Voyages…1.1 The Old Irish ‘Genre System’, Otherworlds, and Utopias1.2 The Tropological Mode 1.3 The Intertextual Matrix 1.4 Structure and Route 2 C. S. Lewis, the Dawn Treader, and St Brendan2.1 C. S. Lewis’s Dialogic Imagination2.2 The Dawn Treader and Fourfold Interpretation3 Umberto Eco, ‘Reality’ and Prester John3.1 Creating and Following the Footsteps of Saint Brendan3.2 Umberto Eco’s Construction of Space3.3 Making the Incredulous Reader Believe in the Fantastic4 Jonathan Swift, the Echtra and the Immram Tradition4.1 Swift and Allegorical Reading4.2 Swift’s Real-World Framework4.3 Gulliver’s Islands and the Problems of Utopia5 Star Trek as Immram, and ‘Space, the Final Frontier…’5.1 Planets as Islands5.2 ‘Optimism, Captain!’ Rowing-about with Cheer5.3 These are the Immrama of the Starship Echtra6 Stargate as an Echtra Narrative6.1 Stargate’s Planetary Otherworlds6.2 Stargate Ustopias6.3 Postcolonial Echtrai7 ConclusionBibliographyIndex