The City's Hostile Bodies: Coriolanus's Rome and Carson's Belfast
Journal: The Modern Language Review
Year: 2020

When change is articulated in literary cities as diverse as Coriolanus' (1608) early republican Rome and Ciaran Carson's Troubles Belfast in Belfast Confetti (1989), bodies become the agents of that change. These bodies-at-war induce stasis: a civil war in which the domestic is politicised and the political domesticated. To resolve the violence at the heart of these evolving polities, these hostile bodies claim sovereignty over the city -whether Shakespeare's plebeians or Coriolanus; Carson's un