Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation

Relaunching Titanic: Memory and Marketing in the New Belfast

Relaunching Titanic critically considers the invocation of Titanic heritage in Belfast in contributing to a new ‘post-conflict’ understanding of the city. The authors address how the memory of Titanic is being and should be represented in the place of its origin, from where it was launched into the collective consciousness and unconscious of western civilization.

Relaunching Titanic examines the issues in the context of international debates on the tension between place marketing of cities and other alternative portrayals of memory and meaning in places. Key questions include the extent to which the goals of economic development are congruous with the ‘contemplative city’ and especially the need for mature and creative reflection in the ‘post-conflict’ city, whether development interests have taken precedence over the need for a deeper appreciation of a more nuanced Titanic legacy in the city of Belfast, and what Belfast shares with other places in considering the sacred and profane in memory construction.

While Relaunching Titanic focuses on the conflicted history of Belfast and the Titanic, it will have lessons for planners and scholars of city branding, tourism, and urban re-imaging.

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

Constitutional Questions

Constitutional Questions
Professor John Morison MRIA School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast
How should we live together? Is there any ethical question more fundamental than this?
Is a constitution only about who does what in government or is it about what is to be done? Does a constitution provide the ground rules for deciding this or is it part of the answer itself? Is it the repository of fundamental values about how to live? What is the good life anyway? Is it about the preservation of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Or something more? What about preserving (or radically reordering) the distribution of property? Or ensuring that everyone has the same chances? Is it the job of the constitution to simply promise dignity, equality and freedom, or to deliver these values?
If the constitution is the place where the state undertakes “to promote the welfare of the whole people”, what does this actually mean in practical terms? And who pays for it? Should a constitution give us an entitlement to at least a basic minimum by way of a lifestyle? Or is it the job only of the political process to decide issues about the allocation of resources? What do we do if we feel that we cannot trust our politicians? Are there basic rules that should govern the operation of politics and are there fundamental values that should not be overridden? Are these “sacred and undeniable”? Or to be interpreted in line with modern conditions and within a “margin of appreciation”? Who decides on this in individual cases?
Who is entitled to any of this, and on what basis? Is everyone equal? Is the constitution about making it clear that no-one is better than you, and that in turn, you are better than no-one? Is a constitution about ensuring that you will always be an end in yourself and never simply a means to anyone else’s end? Or does it simply reinforce the existing distribution of power and wealth?
Are citizens to be given more than those who are not citizens? Is more to be expected from them, and what might that be? Can the constitution tell us how we should treat those from outside who now live with us?
What is the relationship between a constitution and a nation? Who is in the nation anyway? Should we talk about “we the people” or “we the peoples”? Should a constitution confirm a nationality or facilitate diversity? Is the constitution the place to declare aspirations for a national territory? Or to confirm support for the idea of consent? What about all our neighbours – on the island of Ireland and in Great Britain? Or in Europe? And beyond?
What is the relationship between a constitution and democracy? Is a constitution simply the rules by which the powerful govern the powerless? In what sense does a constitution belong to everyone, across past, present and future generations? Is it the place where we state common values? Are there any? Do they change across time? Should the people be asked about changes they may want? How often should this be done? Should the constitution address the past and its problems? How might this be done? What do we owe future generations?
Finally, if we can agree that the constitution is about respecting human rights, striving for social justice and building a fair and democratic Ireland – North and South – how do we make it happen in practice?

Religious Nationalism and Christian Zionist Pilgrimages to Holy Landscapes

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

At Easter 1916, Dublin city centre was one of a series of sites throughout Ireland where a rebellion was staged against British rule. It was a strategic failure, swiftly crushed by superior British forces. The event, however, subsequently took a central role in the mythology of modern Ireland.

The first visual representations were of the conflict’s aftermath: photographic journeys through landscapes of ruin. From the distance of the camera, we see none of the pockmarks of shell bursts, nor the etchings of machine guns. Instead, traces of life in the city seem to have been swept aside by an unseen hand: the passing of millennia or a violent action of nature. Architecture alone has witnessed and recorded its presence. Amongst the fragments, the shell of the General Post Office (G.P.O.) in Sackville Street is one of the few buildings still wholly recognizable. The remnants of its classical form, portico and pediment, columns and entablature seem to transcend its prosaic modern functions and allude to something more ancient. The bewilderment of city’s inhabitants is also recorded. Dubliners have become inquisitive tourists in streets which hitherto were the locus of everyday life. They wander around aimlessly in a landscape as alien and picturesque as Pompeii. This shift in perception was captured by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who hinted that Dublin, purged of modern commercialism had transcended its petty inadequacies to revive a slumbering heroic past.

‘I have met them at the close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses [.]’
All is changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’

His comments were prescient. Initially unpopular, the republican leaders, executed by the British, slowly became recast as heroic martyrs. Similarly, the spaces where their heroism was forged became venerated. The G.P.O. and Sackville Street, however, already had a republican history. It was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as part of a series of magnificent urban spaces to provide an arena of spectacle and self-celebration for the colonial Anglo-Irish and their vision of a Protestant republic. O’Connell/Sackville Street became the temporal, geographical and mythical hinge upon which two different versions of Irish republicanism waxed and waned. Its recasting after independence as a space of Catholic Nationalism bore testimony to its consistency in providing a backdrop for the production of ritual and myth. In the 1920s and 30s, as the nascent country, beset with economic stagnation and political tensions, turned to spectacle as a salve for it social problems, O’Connell Street and the G.P.O. provided its most sacred sites. Within the introduction of new myths, however, individual as well as national identities were created and consolidated. The emerging identity of modern Ireland became inextricably linked with that of one ambitious politician. His uses of the G.P.O. in particular revealed a perceptive understanding of the political uses of classical architecture and urban space.