Erin Cunningham (KCL) - 2016-17 Students
erin.cunningham@kcl.ac.uk

The Modern Irish Sonnet

My research examines the sonnet in Ireland from 1900 to the present day, and will consider both the formal and the ideological motivations behind Irish writers’ use of the form. I am particularly interested in how the sonnet is used to embody Irish landscapes and histories, and how poetic form interacts with ideas of violence in Irish poetry. Existing studies of the Irish sonnet are relatively brief, and I hope to provide a longer and more comprehensive account which draws upon the work of a range of poets including, but not limited to, Yeats, Kavanagh, Heaney, Boland, Muldoon, and Ní Chuilleanáin.