Imaginary Irelands in Ciaran Carson’s sonnet Cycle "The Twelfth Of Never"

Abstract

Ciaran Carson’s sonnet cycle The Twelfth of Never is remarkable for its dense allusive texture that is not an end in itself but a means of exploring various constructs of Ireland and its history. Viewed as a body of poems, the sonnets create a metaphorical space that erodes the difference between fact and fiction, the colonial and anti-colonial clichés of Irishness and draws the reader into a game with the established literary modes. Therefore the current paper analyses the transformations of the sonnet form and the interplay between the Irish and English poetic traditions in The Twelfth of Never and their implications for the revision of stereotypical concepts essential to the metanarrative of Irish history.