"The endless mutation of the shore": Colm Tóibín's marine imaginary

This essay examines the role and significance of marine geographies in the fiction of Colm Tóibín, with specific reference to his novels The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), and The Blackwater Lightship (1999). By showing how liminal landscapes resonate with Tóibín's revisionist sensibility, the essay argues that the marine spaces of these novels are properly read as enabling metaphors for the transitional state of contemporary Irish society, which may yet figure forth a future freed from the constraining myth of national territory and its attendant calcified ideologies, as perceived by the novelist. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.