Rewriting the Western: Transnational Dimensions and Gender Fluidity in Sebastian Barry’s Days without End

The present essay will explore the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s transnational rendering of the American West in his novel Days without End (2016), emphasizing his representation of neglected western questions and realities and his revision of traditional western tropes and archetypes. Barry’s approach to the American West in Days without End moves beyond the regional and national imagery of this territory, revealing its international and hybrid properties and its multiple and overlapping cultures. It is argued that Barry’s recreation of a different reality from the traditional western monomyth of masculinity, individualism, and Anglo-American conquest allows him to challenge classical frontier narratives and to address international and transcultural issues, such as gender fluidity. The novel, whose main protagonist and narrator is a poor, homosexual Irish immigrant, embraces a different West, questioning romanticized versions of the westward expansion and drawing interesting connections between the Irish immigrants in this region and the Native Americans. Overall, Days without End may be viewed as an acute depiction of the transnational dimension of the American West, proving the power of the Western to overcome its traditional formulaic and mythic boundaries and to travel across global spaces.

The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary: Terraqueous Territorialization and Māori Marine Environments

This paper interprets the disrupted establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, a 620,000 square kilometre marine protection area, as a crucial moment in Pacific frontier making. The development of large-scale protected marine areas is a politically charged frontier tool, in which states garner international recognition and environmental renown by setting aside large swathes of their exclusive economic zones. In the Kermadec Sanctuary, this enclosure hit against an assemblage of Indigenous histories, ecologies, repatriated fishing rights, and privatized fishing quota challenging the oftmarginalized agency of Indigenous people in frontier narratives. This paper argues that three factors are fundamental to untangling this conflict: first, the historical trajectory of terraqueous territorialization in the Kermadec region, second, the post-Treaty of Waitangi settlement dynamics of Maori marine environments, and third, the common ecosystem services model underlying conservation and extraction.

American Gothic Culture

This Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture - its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known literary and other works. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Moving from analyses of eighteenth-century literature to twenty-first century video games, and touching upon visual art, film, and television, serial killers, monsters, education and cityscapes, this Companion aims to demonstrate the centrality of the gothic to American culture writ large through four key sections: Gothic Histories, Gothic Identities; Gothic Genres, Gothic Sites; Gothic Media; and American Creatures.