Description

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Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.    

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

About the Author

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TIM WENZELL is an associate professor at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. He has published widely in all genres, including a novel, short stories, poetry, and ecocritical essays on both Irish and American literature, as well as the book Emerald Green: An Ecocritical Study of Irish Literature.

Praise For…

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"Irish literature’s ubiquitous relationship to the environment offers a vast reservoir of meditations on humanity’s relationship with non-human natures. This can often prove daunting to both established scholars and novice readers. For all those who are interested in the intersectional concerns that arise from Irish literature’s evocations of the environment, Tim Wenzell’s timely anthology will prove to be especially invaluable. The book brings into sharp focus the unique ways in which Irish history merges with national and geopolitical ecologies, and how geographical questions are always conflated with geological ones.” 
— Dr. Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"Time has shaped a distinctive history of Irish nature literature in a deeply gathered, insightful anthology....Itself a generous treasury of Irish nature poetry and prose, the book is ordered by historical responses to religion, romanticism, colonisation, catastrophe, nationalism and material success."
— Irish Times

"Wenzell's annotated selection is timely, looking as it does at a genre that doesn't seem to have bitten in Ireland quite as hard as it has in other publishing territories, a symptom perhaps of a more complicated - and at times harrowing - relationship with the natural world."
— Sunday Independent

"This anthology emphasizes the importance of the natural world of Ireland and the breadth of writing that has embraced it during many centuries." 
— Gale Literature Book Review Index

"Readers familiar with Irish literature and ecocriticism will find this volume filled with familiar faces and materials, as well as a few more obscure and exciting ones. This anthology offers scholars a series of substantial pieces from which to expand and further consider Irish nature writing and Irish approaches to the natural world."
— Irish Studies Review

"The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News As Recommended by the UP Community" 
https://lithub.com/the-best-of-the-university-presses-a-reading-list/
— LitHub

"Woven Shades of Green...shows the great variety and depth of editor Tim Wenzell’s knowledge and insight on the topic across history. He possesses a keen sense for choosing not only the key authors and texts, but also often underappreciated writers or lesser known works by famous ones."
— James Joyce Literary Supplement

"A generous and inclusive anthology, focusing mainly on poetry but open also to significant pieces of prose....The engagement by these writers shows a valuable addition to the literature of the natural world."
— New Hibernia Review