Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. With his birthplace and hometown of Belfast as a recurrent—and often gritty—frame of reference, Carson engages the themes of history, geography, violence, and power. In this in-depth study, Neal Alexander employs urbanism, cultural theory, and literary criticism to decipher the ways in which Carson imaginatively navigates the ideas of space and place. A truly groundbreaking book and a new critical framework for exploring literary representations of space, this is the first study to consider the entire Carson canon, including poetry, prose, and translation.    (20110601)