The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, arguing that the roots of Irish modernism lie in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity.

'The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature' looks at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, arguing that the roots of Irish modernism lie in the attempt by the survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity.

The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature offers a fresh new look at the origins of literary modernism in Ireland, tracing a history of Irish writing through James Clarence Mangan, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with the archives of the Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland between 1824 and 1846, the book argues that one of the sources of Irish modernism lies in the attempt by the Survey to produce a comprehensive archive of a land emerging rapidly into modernity. The Ordnance Survey instituted a practice of depicting the country as modern, fragmented, alienated, and troubled, both diagnosing and representing a landscape burdened with the paradoxes of colonial modernity. Subsequent literature returns in varying ways, both imitative and combative, to the complex representational challenge that the Survey confronts and seeks to surmount. From a colonial mapping project to an engine of nationalist imagining, and finally a framework by which to evade the claims of the postcolonial nation, the Ordnance Survey was a central imaginative source of what makes Irish modernist writing both formally innovative and politically challenging. Drawing on literary theory, studies of space, the history of cartography, postcolonial theory, archive theory, and the field Irish Studies, The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature paints a picture of Irish writing deeply engaged in the representation of a multi-layered landscape.

This “absorbing history of the Ordnance Survey”—the first complete map of the British Isles—"charts the many hurdles map-makers have had to overcome” (The Guardian, UK). Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance Survey map, the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, and this is—amazingly—the first popular history to tell the story of the map and the men who dreamt and delivered it. The Ordnance Survey’s history is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s also a deliciously readable account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, featuring intrepid individuals lugging brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time.

A unique contemporary analysis of the huge imperial mapping project of the British Government in nineteenth century Ireland, which describes as well as re-interprets the value of science and modernity as practiced by the British empire. The book raises questions about representation and academic discourses and highlights and interprets colonial techniques of observation and description. The nature of "evidence" within colonial archive is also questioned. Focussing on the main aspects of the survey from a contemporary theoretical perspective it both enlivens the original documents and serves as a sensitive critique of it. The main themes are ethnographic description, translation and cartography and the relationship between them in the nineteenth century. Central to this is the emerging 'view' of Ireland and the Irish and the idea of the project as representative of early Irish ethnography. The book contains new findings in relation to renowned scholars such as John O'Donovan and re-engages with the Friel.vs Andrews debate on 'Translation and Irish Culture' The book should be of wide interest to folklorists, cultural sociologists, geographers, historians, ethnologists, cultural studies, Irish language scholars and the general reader with an interest in Ireland.

Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology. Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.