Relational Forms: Medial and Textual Transits in Ireland and Britain

This research group is defined by a commitment to forms of textual transit, cultural transfer, and intermediality. Temporally, it focuses on modern and contemporary literatures and cultures, with occasional extensions to other periods.

Its goals largely coincide with the following areas of academic inquiry:

1. the cultures of Ireland and Britain, relations and representations: the priority given to Ireland in the group’s name is a foundational trait in which Relational Forms takes pride. Indeed, our focus on Irish texts and cultural forms makes us the only structured research venture in Portugal with a sustained and continuous Irish dimension since 2004. However, our inquiry extends to the textual dynamics that mark other cultures in the British Isles, considered from a doubly exogenous perspective – our Portuguese vantage point, and the critical perspective gained through the Irish bias;
2. texts in transit 1, translations, appropriations, rewritings: the group understands translation as referring to more processes than interlingual transit. It also explores homologies between the culturally exogenous approach described under 1 above, and the relations between literature and other practices, verbal and non-verbal media;
3. texts in transit 2, intermedial transfer; literature and the visual arts;
4. texts in transit 3, time, space, experience: literature encounters biography, historiography, geography.