ABSTRACT
In a recent attempt to decipher the ‘marine imaginary’ of Colm Tóibín’s writing, Harte has characterised the Irish author’s seaside settings as ‘enabling metaphors for the transitional state of contemporary Irish society’ (333). In his reconstruction of Tóibín’s ‘symbolic exploitation’ (339) of coastal scenarios Harte construes their ‘signifying potential’ (346) according to a correlation between shifting shorelines and shifting semantics, between a geological erosion and an ideological deconstruction of received myths of Irishness: Tóibín’s specific seasides are shown to foreground the ‘malleable condition of contemporary Ireland’ insofar as they ‘gesture toward new, more pluralistic forms of cultural identity and more enlightened forms of self-knowledge and historical understanding that are postnationalist in their inflection’ (339).
