Elmer Kennedy-Andrews – författare

With the publication of "The Scarlet Letter" in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne achieved not only critical recognition in his native New England, but also an undisputed place amongst the newly emerging ranks of great American writers. This guide introduces and sets in context, the enormous range of critical arguments that have been generated by this enduring work. From the comments and reviews of Hawthorne's contemporaries through discussions of the novel by fellow artists such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence to radical re-readings of the postwar decades, the reader is given an invaluable guide to the critical progress of this key American text.

The idea of place, and of being displaced, is a powerful leit-motif in Northern Irish poetry. It is here explored in depth, from the 1960s to the present day.Ideas of home, place and identity have been continually questioned, re-imagined and re-constructed in Northern Irish poetry. Concentrating on the period since the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, this study provides a detailed consideration of the work of several generations of poets, from Hewitt and MacNeice, to Fiacc and Montague, to Simmons, Heaney, Mahon and Longley, to Muldoon, Carson, Paulin and McGuckian, to McDonald, Morrissey, Gillisand Flynn. It traces the extent to which their writing represents a move away from concepts of rootedness and towards a deterritorialized poetics of displacement, mobility, openness and pluralism in an era of accelerating migration and globalisation. In the new readings of place, inherited maps are no longer reliable, and home is no longer the stable ground of identity but seems instead to be always where it is not. The crossing of boundaries and the experience of diaspora open up new understandings of the relations between places, a new sense of the permeability and contingency of cultures, and new concepts of identity and home.Professor ELMER KENNEDY-ANDREWS teaches in the Department of English at the University of Ulster.