Unfolding Irish landscapes

Tim Robinson, culture and environment

Edited by Derek Gladwin, Christine Cusick

Publication date:

01 January 2016

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm

ISBN-13: 9781784992781

An unprecedented compilation of critical and creative essays and visual texts from leading international scholars, Unfolding Irish landscapes presents cross-disciplinary studies of the prose, cartography, visual art and cultural legacy of the award-winning work of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson. This book explores the process in which Robinson has addressed the historical and geographical tensions that suffuse the landscapes of Ireland. Robinson’s distinctive methods of map-making and topographical writing capture the geographical and cultural consciousness of not only Ireland, but also of the entire North Atlantic archipelago. Through both topographic prose and cartography Robinson undertakes one of the greatest explorations of the Irish landscape by a single person in recent history, paralleling, if not surpassing, Robert Lloyd Praeger’s extensive catalogue of writings and natural histories of western Ireland.

Foreword – Robert Macfarlane
Introduction: Ireland’s ‘ABC of earth wonders’ – Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin
Part 1: Explorations in cartography and geography
1. Genius loci: the geographical imagination of Tim Robinson – Patrick Duffy
2. Catchments – John Elder
3. ‘The fineness of things’: the deep mapping projects of Tim Robinson’s art and writings, 1969-1972 – Nessa Cronin
4. Documentary map-making and film-making in Pat Collins’ Tim Robinson: Connemara – Derek Gladwin
Part 2: Topographic writing and narrative
5. ‘And now intellect, discovering its own effects’: Tim Robinson as narrative scholar – Christine Cusick
6. Not-knowing as aesthetic imperative in Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran – Kelly Sullivan
7. Thirteen ways of looking at a landscape: the poetic in the work of Tim Robinson – Moya Cannon
8. Tim Robinson and Chris Arthur: in defence of the Irish essay – Karen Babine
Part 3: Place and the Irish cultural imagination
9. ‘But his study is out of doors’: Tim Robinson’s place in Irish studies – Eamonn Wall
10. Maps, movements, and migrants: reading Tim Robinson though Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta – Jerry White
11. ‘About nothing, about everything’: listening in / to Tim Robinson – Gerry Smyth
12. ‘another half-humanized boulder lying on unprofitable ground’: the visual art of Tim Robinson/Timothy Drever – Catherine Marshall
13. ‘An ear to the earth’: matrixial gazing in Tim Robinson’s walk-art-text practice – Moynagh Sullivan
14. Essayist of place: postcolonialism and ecology in the work of Tim Robinson – Eóin Flannery
Epilogue: On the rocks road – Andrew McNeillie
Bibliography
Index

‘Robinson comes across not only as a brilliant storyteller and interpreter of the landscape but also as intensely human. Thus, the contributors to Unfolding Irish Landscapes mirror Robinson’s own practice: just as he unfolds the Irish landscape, revealing its history to his readers, so, too, do these scholars reveal Robinson to us.’
Leila Crawford, University of Otago, Irish Studies Review, Issue 24.4, November 2016

‘The volume is an impressive, ambitious and timely endeavor to chart the depth and range of the career of one of the most influential and original figures in the field of Irish Studies and the philosophy of landscape.’
Anne Karhio, National University of Ireland, Nordic Irish Studies