W poszukiwaniu autentycznej Irlandii – o krajobrazach w powieści Kolonia Audrey Magee

Abstract

This article examines Audrey Magee’s novel The Colony, published in Poland in 2024. The author of the article focuses on those parts of the novel that concern the Irish landscape and its inhabitants, as perceived by the novel’s main characters: primarily an English painter, and also a French linguist. In her reflections, she refers to an understanding of the concept of ‘landscape’ related to seeing, painting and also to the Gilpinian picturesque. She reflects on landscape in the context of the ‘authenticity’ sought by the aforementioned protagonists. To this end, she analyses, among other things, the clichés and cultural conventions that constitute for both points of reference. On the margins of these considerations, she also proposes that the cultural prefigurations of the experience of space drawn from painting, fixed in literary texts, can be called literary ‘Claude glasses’.