“Tuath meaning people, meaning place”. An Ecocritical Analysis of Grace Wells’s The Church of the Love of the World.

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse Grace Wells’ third poetry collection The Church of the Love of the World. The relevant aspects that will be tackled are the individual and their relationship with the environment as well as the history of Ireland. In her ecopoetry , Grace Wells vindicates the importance of nature, spirit-of-place, memory, story, myth, the land, and ecological concern in local ethnic communities, which serve as global examples. These approaches are mainly developed throughout the whole collection with the purpose of enhancing biodiversity and ecological awareness of multiple environmental crises in contemporary society. Moreover, the portrayal of environmental issues that go beyond the landscape will be explored, that is, the treatment of the individual and the suffering in the context of a relationship with the nature. Significantly, globalization and the current iteration of Western culture have brought about the uniformity of the world and caused the loss of diversity by distancing human beings from nature and suppressing their love for the world. As for methodology, this study will employ the theoretical framework of ecocriticism in its different forms: ecofeminism, postcolonial ecocriticism, and eco-spirituality. Furthermore, this analysis will be accompanied by literary criticism such as Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (2011) by Donna L. Potts in order to inquire the differences between ecopoetry and pastoralism. An additional and fundamental reference will be Eóin Flannery’s Ireland and Ecocriticism (2016), which provides a through ecocritical apparatus in the context of Irish literature. Finally, the article “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s) (2018) by Margarita Estévez Saá and María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, will orient this analysis thanks to its survey of the main debates within ecofeminism