Iceland-Ireland: Memory, Literature, Culture on the Atlantic Periphery

Iceland and Ireland, two North-Atlantic islands on the periphery of Europe, share a long history that reaches back to the ninth century. Direct contact between the islands has ebbed and flowed like their shared Atlantic tides over the subsequent millennium, with long blanks and periods of apparently very little exchange, transit or contact. These relational and regularly ruptured histories, discontinuities and dispossessions are discussed here less to cover (again) the well-trodden ground of our national traditions. Rather, this volume productively illuminates how a variety of memory modes, expressed in trans-cultural productions and globalized genre forms, such as museums cultures, crime novels, the lyric poem, the medieval codex or historical fiction, operate in multi-directional ways as fluid transnational agents of change in and between the two islands. At the same time, there is an alertness to the ways in which physical, political and linguistic isolation and exposure have also made these islands places of forgetting.