At the end of Volume VI of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne's eponymous author-narrator pauses to review his progress so far, presenting the reader with a series of visual diagrams representing the course taken by his narrative in the preceding volumes. In each of these a series of turns and detours, loops and spirals indicate the various digressions, whimsical flourishes, and redundant elaborations he has made along his meandering and pointedly non-linear way from beginning to middle to end. Moreover, in a characteristically Sternean irony, it is during this digression upon his tendency to digress that Tristram determines to mend his ways and continue with his story ‘in a tolerable straight line’, one ‘turning neither to the right hand or to the left’.

Such deliberate self-contradictions have led Paul Muldoon to regard Tristram Shandy as exemplary of a wider tendency in Irish writing towards the disruption of linearity by way of ‘veerings from, over, and back along a line’ and a related affinity for ‘the notions of di-, trans-, and regression’. To say nothing of Muldoon himself, such tendencies are prominent in the restlessly inventive interest in narrative and storytelling that has been evident in Ciaran Carson's writing at least since the publication of The Irish for No in 1987.

The publication in 2008 of Ciaran Carson's Collected Poems, timed to coincide with the poet's sixtieth birthday, is an obvious milestone along the way of his development as a writer. Leafing through its nearly 600 pages, which include work from eight principal collections produced over a period of more than thirty years, the reader is likely to be struck by the extraordinary scope and resourcefulness of Carson's writing. Experimental rather than self-consciously avant-garde, Carson's poetry exhibits a remarkable linguistic inventiveness, formal complexity, and intellectual daring, always making a concerted effort to communicate with the reader yet also foregrounding the resistances that poetic language affords to habitual modes of perception and understanding. His writing often seems intoxicated with the myriad sensations and experiential atoms it attempts to register and record, wielding a microscopic focus upon the particular that freely transmits a MacNeicean awareness of ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ to his readers. Equally vertiginous is his almost paranoiac intuition of concealed patterns and linkages, so that it often appears that an infinity of connections may proceed from a single observation. Carson first made his name as a brilliant anatomist of the city and urban experience, topics that continue to occupy a central role in his aesthetic; but recently he has emerged as a Borgesian miniaturist of the universal, exploring the fractal worlds within worlds created in and by language.

In the discourse of cultural theory it seems that there is considerable confusion, or at least deep ambivalence, concerning the status and function of maps and mapping. In this context it is important to note that mapping tends to be treated by cultural theorists less in terms of its specific histories and methodological principles than as a set of concepts that are often employed in explicitly metaphorical ways – ‘mapping’, then, rather than strict cartography. On the one hand, there is a tendency to equate mapping with the apparatuses of the state and of social control, as a sort of graphic inscription of panoptic authority that is imposed upon the territory. Certainly, the historical and strategic importance of charts, maps, and plans in the expansion of European imperialism plays a large part in determining this view. For instance, David Harvey observes that ‘the mapping of the world opened up a way to look upon space as open to appropriation for private uses. Mapping also turned out to be far from ideologically neutral.’ Similarly, Doreen Massey discusses maps as ‘ordering representations’ that operate as a ‘technology of power’ by stabilising the co-ordinates of time-space and constructing the geographical territory as ‘a coherent closed system’. This question of closure or delimitation is crucial, for the widespread suspicion of cartography on the part of cultural theorists is arguably also symptomatic of a more widespread, and loosely post-structuralist, distrust of totalisations and grand narratives.

The importance and complexity of memory in Carson's aesthetic is apparent when, as in ‘Ambition’, time is conceived as a road that rarely runs straight, its course marked by manifold obstructions and convolutions. After all, the action of taking one step forward, two steps back can be understood in temporal as well as spatial terms, and in Carson's writing the past typically manifests itself as ‘a trail of moments/ Dislocated, then located’ (IFN, 58) that precludes a commanding overview. This much is clear in the opening lines of ‘Ambition’, where the narrator and his father have climbed Black Mountain in order to survey Belfast's cityscape from an elevated vantage-point: ‘Now I've climbed this far, it's time to look back. But smoke obscures/ The panorama from the Mountain Loney spring.’ That the poem should begin with an act of ‘looking back’ invites a reading in metaphorical terms, for during the ascent the two men have been ‘smoking “coffin nails”’ and the speaker's father has been recalling ‘his time inside’. Mistaken for his brother, he had been interned without trial for seven weeks in August 1971, an experience that ghosts the whole of the narrative and is the source of a series of quips and asides, adages and practical knowledge – ‘seven cigarette ends made a cigarette’ – but is only ever relayed indirectly and in a deliberately fragmented or ‘dislocated’ form. As the narrator wryly observes at one point, ‘my father's wandered off somewhere. I can't seem to find him’ (BC, 27).

The singularity of a literary work, argues Derek Attridge, is best understood as an event in which the reader experiences both inventiveness and alterity. Each reading constitutes ‘an appreciation, a living-through, of the invention that makes the work not just different but a creative reimagination of cultural materials’. My contention is that the singularity of Ciaran Carson's writing rests upon his far-reaching imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place, and particularly urban spatiality in an Irish context. It is the purpose of this chapter to set out a critical framework for exploring these engagements in their widest manifestations. Carson's oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, is in many ways remarkably diverse and eclectic, ranging as it does across generic, geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries with seeming effortlessness and voracious enthusiasm, insistently placing ‘literature’ within the constellations of a wider universe of discourse and deliberately eschewing distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms. He is restlessly inventive in his experiments with form, combining and reworking a wide range of poetic structures and metres with elements adapted from fictional and non-fiction prose narratives, music and popular song, the visual arts and vernacular speech patterns. However, in spite of this propensity for variety there is little doubt that the city of Belfast occupies a central place within Carson's heterogeneous texts, functioning as a sort of imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns – music, language, narrative, memory, history – are arrayed, like spokes on the hub of a wheel.

Translation is a longstanding and recurrent component of Ciaran Carson's work, not only as practice, process, and artefact – as his recent book-length versions of Dante's Inferno, Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, and the Old Irish epic, The Táin, attest – but also as a theme or trope that relates to the multifarious effects of language itself. In this regard ‘translation’ concerns itself with the ways in which transactions between words, idioms, discourses, and languages reveal the difference that is internal to all language. Or, as Walter Benjamin expresses it, ‘all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’. Translation also literally means to ‘carry across’, shuttling between differing contexts in order to negotiate meanings that are fundamentally unstable and in dialogue with other meanings, so that translation in this expanded sense is what poetry is all about, as Carson himself has suggested: ‘“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Perhaps; but poetry is itself translation, carrying a burden of meaning from one place to another, feeling it change in shape and weight as it travels. Words are a shifty business.’ Here, the notion that poetry is inimical to translation, often apocryphally ascribed to Robert Frost, is turned abruptly on its head, and Carson's more open conception of translation recognises that while words and languages are ‘shifty’, untrustworthy even, such ‘shiftiness’ means that they also encode multiple semantic possibilities.

Given his desire to know the street map with his feet, it is unsurprising that the act of walking should play such a prominent role in Carson's writing. Indeed, his is a distinctively peripatetic aesthetic. Time and again walking serves not only as a means of registering urban experience, the medium through which all manner of encounters, associations, and sidelong observations are made; it also functions as a figure for the meandering, digressive nature of Carson's narratives, in which ‘one thing leads to another’ (FFA, 152) much as the pedestrian wends her way through the divagating and interconnecting streets of the city. Form and content echo and reinforce each other in this respect, and in both his poetry and his prose Carson's wayward stories are very often told by narrators travelling on foot. This is true even of his translations, as the opening lines of The Inferno and The Midnight Court respectively show:

The implicit connection here between ‘strolling’, ‘wandering’, and ‘straying’ is important, for, as Rebecca Solnit observes, walking need not necessarily have a fixed destination but may serve as ‘a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences’.

Despite their diversity of approaches, the essays in this volume challenge us to rethink our ideas of the novel as a genre, and of the literary movement known as Romanticism. They propose that the Romantic-era novel was characterized by a fierce concern with the interpenetration among political structures, literary forms and genres, and individual subjectivity. Furthermore, they argue that the Romantic-era novel was engaged on the level of both form and content with re-imagining community, as the nature of sociality changed in a newly mobile, urban world. Such re-imagining came from a number of different perspectives, including the utopianism of the Jacobin novel, the nightmarish vision of gothic conspiracy, and the scepticism that questioned even ‘enlightened’ social structures; yet all these narrative strategies encouraged readers to see the world anew.

The last decade has produced ground-breaking new work on the Romantic-era novel. This scholarship has generally followed two different, though hardly mutually exclusive, trends: the recovery of little-read authors who were popular in their day, but who have slipped into obscurity in our own; and the recovery of long-ignored political and cultural contexts for Romantic-era fiction. The essays in the present collection contribute to both approaches. Some add to our understanding of authors such as Mary Hays, who, until recently, were unknown to most readers. More, however, follow the second path, and ask how previously unexplored contexts can help us recognize Romantic-era novels in new and fuller ways.

Although it is less often remarked upon than the other revolutions of the Romantic era, an epoch-making event occurred in the British literary field at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth: the novel quantifiably became the dominant literary genre of the day. Peter Garside demonstrates that in the first three decades of the nineteenth century ‘out-put of fiction almost certainly overtook that of poetry, and the genre eventually gained new respectability’, triumphantly surpassing others. Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schowerling have recorded entries for 1106 fiction titles between 1780 and 1799 and entries for 2256 fiction titles first published in Britain in the thirty years between 1800 and 1829. Thus, as Clifford Siskin argues, the reasons for critics' ignorance or rejection of the Romantic novel do not arise from

And yet rather than the linear trajectory we have been schooled to expect by the arrow-like image of ‘the rise of the novel’, the novel during the Romantic-era ‘took off’ in all directions.

Mary Shelley's decision to start writing short stories for the literary annuals in the 1820s and 1830s is usually represented as discontinuous with her earlier career, part of the fall into commercialism and conservatism occasioned by Percy Shelley's death. Even those who have paid critical attention to the stories often denigrate them. Gregory O'Dea, for instance, writes: “For much of her later literary career, Mary Shelley was a hack writer . . . [She] filled the spaces between her increasingly disregarded novels by turning her pen to essays, reviews, bits of history and travelogue, and, what certainly marks her reduced circumstances, tales for The Keepsake.” One recent biographer calls these “insipid tales for ladies' annuals” “wordy and pedestrian.”

Yet it is important to remember that Mary Shelley always wrote for money. Any sharp distinction between what Shelley wrote for profit, and what she wrote inspired by a creative urge above Mammon would be false, although we may be able to distinguish the degree of financial pressure exerted on her various compositions. Indeed, her first short story, “Mounseer Nongtongpaw,” written when she was ten and a half, made a good profit for her father’s publishing company. Until her father-in-law’s death in 1844, Mary Shelley’s financial situation, throughout her early life, marriage, and most of her widowhood, was never comfortable.