Home, Space and Place in Contemporary Irish Fiction; or: What Happens to the 'Sense of Place' in the Twenty-First Century

This paper aims at assessing the relevance today of Seamus Heaney’s 1977 definition of what he called ‘the sense of place’ which he deemed characteristic of Irish literature. In my opinion, there is a need indeed to re-examine how well the concept applies today in view of the recent, dramatic evolutions of Irish society and culture, as well as of other similar notions devised by humanist geographers. The scope of the study however is restricted to narrative fiction. The point is to suggest that most contemporary fiction by Irish writers can be divided into three groups as far as their treatment of place and space is concerned. The first group includes writers like Donal Ryan, Paul Lynch or Claire Keegan who continue a tradition illustrated by the generation of John McGahern or Edna O’Brien and picture the sense of place as being synonymous with oppression and repression. A different trend among today’s novelists is to evoke placelessness rather than rootedness as involved by the sense of place. Among them, Oona Frawley and Mike McCormack question the consequences of migrations, but also cosmopolitanism, and of the compression of space in an interconnected world. Finally, a third emerging tendency in contemporary fiction is to ponder the relationship between the human and the non-human at a time when, according to Ursula K. Heise, it matters more to develop a sense of planet rather than a sense of place.