Sounding the Margins is the second of two publications to emerge from the highly successful AFIS conference hosted by the Université de Lille in 2019. Concentrating on the literary manifestations of marginality in Ireland and France, the essays treat of various texts that demonstrate the extent to which marginality is a recurring trope. This may well be because writers tend to situate themselves at a distance from the centre or status quo in their desire to maintain a certain degree of artistic objectivity. But it is also the case that literary practitioners tend to identify more easily with others living on the margins, either through choice or circumstances. The collection is a mixture of comparative studies and essays on individual authors but, in all cases, marginality is presented as a liberating experience once it is freely chosen and embraced.

Sarah Nolan Balen is President of AFIS (Association of Franco-Irish Studies) and a lecturer in Literature at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dublin. She completed a doctoral thesis at the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in TU Dublin which analysed interconnections between the works of several city poets including Charles Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, T.S. Eliot and Peter Sirr - and has published on these and other poets. Eamon Maher is Director of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in TU Dublin - Tallaght Campus and general editor of the Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Studies series with Peter Lang. His most recent book (with Eugene O'Brien) is Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century (2021) and he is currently working on a monograph on the Catholic Novel.