Exile, home and city: the poetic architecture of Belfast

• Ano de defesa: 2012
• Autor(a) principal: Annunciação, Viviane Carvalho da
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Belfast; Literatura norte-irlandesa; Modernism; Modernismo; Northern Irish literature; Poesia; Poetry
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-30102012-123412/

The present thesis is concerned with how the poetry written in Northern Ireland throughout the twentieth century reifies the city of Belfast through language, metaphor and imagery, compiling a concrete constellation of aesthetic experiments. It also examines how its poets have represented not only Belfasts concrete and architectural landmarks, but also its historical and spatial displacements. Due to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, through which Ulster remained a constitutive part of the British Isles, while the South started to build the foundations of what was going to become the Republic of Ireland, Northern Irish poets have built a poetic landscape that has been instead incessantly fragmented through the motifs of alienation and displacement of subjectivity. Through the analysis of the Belfast poems by the poets Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Padraic Fiacc, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, Allen Gillis and Miriam Gamble, the thesis shows the poetic architecture of Belfast points to wider sociological spaces. It is never alone, or even single, but always plural and globally referential. Through a space of confluence which brings together dissimilar discourses, the selected poems present a desire to possess Belfast artistically, a city where art, history and memories intermingle and interact in a dynamic manner. Images, styles and ideas are carried from generation to generation and create a constellation of fearful and hopeful dreams. It engages past and present in a fruitful reflection on identitarian and artistic belonging.