Watery Modernism? Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones and W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman

Abstract

This chapter adopts the lens of ecocriticism to compare Yeats’s early novel John Sherman (1891) to Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), both of which are set in West of Ireland, a region imperilled by modernization in cultural and environmental terms. Published over a century apart, these novels mobilise modernist forms and themes in partial and selective ways to think about water as political, cultural and environmental threshold in the Anthropocene. The bodies of water that surround, permeate and shape the archipelago are the result of gradual geological or climatic change over time but also carry centuries of colonial and imperial history, played out on riverbanks, coasts and shores. In both novels, geography mutates through and against infrastructure, as journeys unfold along shipping routes, roads and railways.