Migrations in an Irish Context: New Worlds, New Words

Abstract

International audienceThis book addresses the issue of migration from or to Ireland since the 17th-18Th century and examines the dynamics of emigration and immigration down to the present day. It is distinctive through its pluri-disciplinary approach of migrating issues in Ireland but also in the way it confronts individual and collective dynamics in the context of migration. Thus, this book aims at offering a comprehensive and englobing understanding of key issues of migration in Ireland today and their legal, social and linguistic impacts, while also focusing on the representations of the migrating experience in literature, be it in poetry or in fiction. In so doing it also aims at reassessing issues of home, place-making and belonging. The book does not restrict itself to a study of emigration or immigration, nor to a historical or economic approach because its goal is to show the complexity of migrating trajectories, whether individual or collective, and how those migrating stories are inscribed within national and supra national dynamics. The study of the words used to narrate those experiences offers a creative insight into the plurality of migrating experiences, hence the place devoted in this book to literary representations