The essays in this volume explore interartistic connections in Irish literature, drama, film and the visual arts. Within modern and postmodern culture, innovation is often driven by surprising interrelations between the arts, and this book offers a discussion of this phenomenon and analyses a number of artworks that move across disciplines. Several contributors examine the concept of ekphrasis, looking at how Irish writers such as Seamus Heaney, John Banville, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Patrick Kavanagh, W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett have responded to the visual arts. Others explore interartistic ‘crossings’ in the drama of Brian Friel, in James Barry’s eighteenth-century Shakespeare paintings and in contemporary Irish film. Together, the essays present a fresh perspective on Irish artistic culture and open up new avenues for future study.

Ruben Moi is Associate Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He has published widely on writers such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Martin McDonagh and Irvine Welsh. Brynhildur Boyce holds a PhD in English Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has taught at Goldsmiths and at the University of Iceland and has published a number of essays on Samuel Beckett, including an essay in Irish Studies Review that won the 2009 British Association for Irish Studies Postgraduate Prize. Charles I. Armstrong is Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation and Professor of British Literature at the University of Agder. He is the author of Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space and the Past (2009) and Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (2003). He also co-edited Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (2011) and Postcolonial Dislocations: Travel, History, and the Ironies of Narrative (2006).