Download or read book Reading in the Dark written by Seamus Deane and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-02-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize Winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International Award "A swift and masterful transformation of family griefs and political violence into something at once rhapsodic and heartbreaking. If Issac Babel had been born in Derry, he might have written this sudden, brilliant book." --Seamus Heaney Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it." Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

Download or read book Studies in Contemporary Irish Politics and Society written by Timothy Jerome White and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Seamus Heaney written by Henry Hart and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland. In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.

Download or read book The Destination of a Rhyme written by Danielle Sered and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book For the Triumph of the Patriot Arms written by Michael Flanagan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Studies in the Drama of Martin McDonagh written by John McDonagh and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Abraham Lincoln and the New Immigrant Irish in 1860s America written by Dennis M. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945 2000 written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 serves as an extended introduction and reference guide to the British and Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of the millennium. Covers a wide range of authors from Samuel Beckett to Salman Rushdie Provides readings of key novels, including Graham Greene’s ‘Heart of the Matter’, Jean Rhys’s ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ Considers particular subgenres, such as the feminist novel and the postcolonial novel Discusses overarching cultural, political and literary trends, such as screen adaptations and the literary prize phenomenon Gives readers a sense of the richness and diversity of the novel during this period and of the vitality with which it continues to be discussed

Download or read book The Place of Writing written by Seamus Heaney and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Twentieth Century Irish Literature written by Aaron Kelly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-06-02 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide surveys existing criticism and theory, making clear the key critical debates, themes and issues surrounding a wide variety of Irish poets, playwrights and novelists. It relates Irish literature to debates surrounding issues such as national identity, modernity and the Revival period, armed struggle, gender, sexuality and post colonialism.

Download or read book Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Since 1969 written by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews and published by Four Courts Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects an evolving situation in the North of Ireland where fiction has overtaken poetry and drama as the most significant and vital literary form. Through an analysis of representative texts, Kennedy-Andrews explores fiction from or about the North from the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 to the present day. The bulk of the study covers recent fiction by new young writers born in the 1960s that grew up during the Troubles. To what extent can this new writing be seen to penetrate new literary terrain through versions of a pluralistic postmodern humanism? To what extent does the new writing inaugurate new mappings of identity and culture beyond the simple binaries of Protestant and Catholic, Nationalist and Unionist, thereby suggesting new possibilities for the future? To what extent does it cross other borders to present a transnational vision informed by the rest of Ireland, Britain, Europe, and America? The study concludes by considering some of the questions raised by women's writing of the Troubles. The volume contains detailed assessments of such writers as: Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, Gerald Seymour, Terence De Vere White, Eugene McCabe, Brian Moore, Maurice Leitch, Bernard McLaverty, Glenn Patterson, Robert MacLiam Wilson, Dermot Healy, Briege Duffaud, Deirdre Madden, David Park, Colin Bateman, Lionel Shriver, Danny Morrison, Ronan Bennett, Seamus Deane, Edna O'Brien, Mary Beckett, Kate O'Riordan and Mary Costello.

Download or read book John McGahern and Modernism written by Richard Robinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern's statements about the 'presence' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern's six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern's fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGahern's fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as 'low' modernism, the complexity of McGahern's time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGahern's narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.

Download or read book Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill written by Bridget Vincent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do poems communicate moral ideas? Can they express concepts in ways that are unique and impossible to replicate in other forms of writing? This book explores these questions by turning to two of the late twentieth century's most important poets: Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Their work shows that a poem can act as an example of a moral concept, rather than simply a description or discussion of it. Exploring these two poets via their shared preoccupation with poetry's moral exemplarity opens up new perspectives on their work. The concept of exemplarity is shown to play an important role in these poets' most significant preoccupations, from moral complicity to the nature of lyric speech to literary influence to memorialisation, responsibility, and aesthetic autonomy. Through this new analysis of poetry, critical prose, drama, and archival materials, this book offers a major new study of ethics in the later period of these two writers--including recent underexplored posthumous works. In turn, the book also makes an important intervention in larger debates about literature and morality, and about the field of ethical criticism itself: this is the first book-length study to expand ethical criticism beyond its customary narrative focus. The ethical criticism of fiction is often an exercise in methodological advocacy, urging the use of more literary examples in moral philosophy. As this book shows, including poetry among these examples introduces new, lyric-inflected caveats about the use of literature as a form of moral example: caveats which remain invisible in narrative-centred ethical criticism.

Download or read book On Seamus Heaney written by Roy Foster and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney’s work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney’s evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney’s cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney’s life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

Download or read book Clearing the Ground written by Carmen Szabo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clearing the Ground”–The Field Day Theatre Company and the Construction of Irish Identities studies the Field Day Theatre Company, with special focus on the plays that they put on stage between 1980 and 1995; it attempts to dissect their policy and observe the way in which this policy influences the discourse of the theatrical productions. Was Field Day simply the “cultural wing” of Sinn Fein and the IRA, or did they try to give voice to a new critical discourse, challenging the traditional frames of representation? This book focuses on a thorough analysis of the way in which Field Day applied the concepts of postcolonial discourse to their own needs of creating a foundation for the ideological manifesto of the company. This study is a critique of the successes and failures of a theatre company that, in a period of political and cultural crisis, engaged in innovative ways of discussing the sensitive issues of identity, memory and history in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Download or read book Getting to Good Friday written by Marilynn Richtarik and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Getting to Good Friday intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland's divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on decades of reading, researching, and teaching Northern Irish literature and talking and corresponding with Northern Irish writers, Marilynn Richtarik describes literary reactions and contributions to the peace process during the fifteen years preceding the Agreement and in the immediate post-conflict era. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators' ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, 'In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across.' Interpreting selected literary works by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature-that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to 'say' about a given subject-can enrich readers' historical understanding. Through Richtarik's engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself.

Download or read book Irish Writing written by Stephen Regan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language?' W. B. YeatsThis anthology traces the history of modern Irish literature from the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century to the early years of political independence. From Charlotte Brooke and Edmund Burke to Elizabeth Bowen and Louis MacNeice, the anthology shows how, in forging a tradition of theirown, Irish writers have continually challenged and renewed the ways in which Ireland is imagined and defined. The anthology includes a wide-ranging and generous selection of fiction, poetry, and drama. Three plays by W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge are printed in their entirety, along with the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume also includes letters, speeches, songs,memoirs, essays, and travel writings, many of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere.'Stephen Regan's anthology vividly and valiantly presents a nation, and a national literature, coming into being.' Paul Muldoon