Stepping Through OriginsJefferson HoldridgeLabel: Syracuse University PressDescription: Since the eighteenth century landscape has played complex psychological and political roles in the narrative of Irishness entailing questions of memory family home exile and forgiveness. In Stepping through Origins Holdridge explores the interplay of these concepts in literature. For Irish writers from Swift to Heaney the Irish landscape has remained not only a reflection of Irish troubles but much like aesthetic experience a space in which the bitterness of family or national life can be understood if not entirely overcome. Through deft analysis of works by leading Irish writers including Lady Morgan Yeats Joyce Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Bowen Holdridge expands and enriches our understanding of how landscape has served as a palimpsest for both family and country connecting personal with collective memory localized places with their regions and individual with national identity.
