Language and Place in Irish Writing with Dr. Derek Hand

Dr. Derek Hand explores the dynamic between place and language in Irish literature, situating it within the work of both earlier and contemporary writers. Many nations share stories that highlight themes of famine, emigration, tradition and the transition to modernity. What sets Irish literature apart is how deeply Irish culture reveres the storyteller, and the act of storytelling itself. That reverence runs through both Gaelic and English traditions, giving Irish writing a dual inheritance shaped by the tension between the two languages.

James Joyce captured this unease when a character declared English “so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of [that] language.” That struggle also extends to place. As Elizabeth Bowen noted, “nothing can happen nowhere”, a curious phrase in its stress on the negative,…