Christoph Reinfandt – författare

The binary between a united Ireland and the current form of partition has provoked writers and scholars and established an important debate about what unity would look like. Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe charts and critically discusses the challenges of articulating unity while one-sided discourses—on either nationalist or unionist grounds—have gradually been integrating an Irish identity that finds itself between Britain and Europe. Crucial to all of this is the role of writers in reimagining Irish writing before and after the Northern Ireland peace process and in reconstituting an idea of Irish unity in their works. Maurice Fitzpatrick, Christoph Reinfandt, and Raphael Zähringer bring together scholars from the fields of philosophy, political science, diplomacy, history, and literary and cultural studies to interpret how the concept of unity has manifested in literary, historical, and political texts. This wide-ranging approach considers a variety of economic perspectives, including how generations of economic shifts have impacted the image of Ireland’s relationship with the UK and Europe. Ultimately, Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe provides coordinates for current debates about how to prepare for Irish unity and what shape it should or could take.

This book traces literature’s long history of repurposing representational language use for performative, “material” effects. It brings this tradition into dialogue with the recent material turn in literary and cultural theory, which seeks to supplant or at least rethink the foundational influence of the linguistic turn in the field. Drawing on a variety of cutting‑edge new‑materialist theories, this book programmatically outlines the contours of a methodology of Interferential Reading that is then brought to bear on examples ranging from Shakespeare, Donne, Keats and Tennyson to Northern Irish poets Colette Bryce and Sinéad Morrissey and Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie; from British thing essays to J. G. Ballard, John Berger, Nicola Barker, Richard Powers, Colum McCann, Tim Crouch, Hanya Yanagihara and Korean writer Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature, and from the history of theatrical bodies to the intermedial as well as affective textures in very recent experimental theatre, live theatre broadcasting and media art.

This book demonstrates that theory in literary and cultural studies has moved beyond overarching master theories towards a greater awareness of particularity and contingency – including its own.

This book demonstrates that theory in literary and cultural studies has moved beyond overarching master theories towards a greater awareness of particularity and contingency – including its own.