Ecologies of Identity: Nature, Landscape, and the Non-Human in Contemporary Irish Short Stories

This research focuses on how contemporary Irish short stories illustrate the knotted relationship between human identity and the non-human world. One of today's necessities is rethinking human limits and embracing insularity. This study positions Ireland as a geographically and culturally distinct context apt to examine these themes in the Global North. By analysing selected short stories published after the Celtic Tiger era, and organising the discourse on a three-sided thematic structure rooted in three animated films created by the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, it enquires how nature and landscapes are integral to the construction of Irish identity in a contemporary globalised Ireland, with a focus on agency, opportunity, and the role of literature in reshaping anthropocenic perspectives. The short story status as a protean genre that refuses categorisation and, even if neglected if confronted with other genres, keeps re-surfacing from the literal mainstream, informs my theory on the short story is the Third Landscape of literary studies. If the Third Landscape “is a territory for the many species that cannot find a place elsewhere” (Clément), the short story is the literal refuge of those hybrids that mainstream prose seems to exclude (Gosh). To re-discover a symbiotic relationship with the landscape in the Global North, a way out of capitalism’s exploitative view that watches every relationship as a conflict between two factions separated by a barricade, the first step to take is to recognise our limits and similarieties with the Other, shifting humanity's exceptionalistic view of their own agency and potential. To question this, the privileged state where we should find ourselves is the in-between state, the top of the barricade.