Seamus Deane - Böcker

This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin's The Collegians, to Bram Stoker's Dracula, from James Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issuesthose of national character, of conflict between discipline and excess, of division between the languages of economics and sensibility, of modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print cultureits novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, poemstake place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised.

This intriguing collection of essays is dominated by the figure of Edmund Burke and by accounts of the ways in which he and some of those he influenced understood the revolutionary changes that produced the modern world. The issues of liberty and empire, faction and revolution, universality, equality, authority, sectarian vice and democratic virtue are central here. Dominating them all is the question of how traditional feeling and affection can be retained within the revolutionary and colonial worlds that emerged at the close of the eighteenth century. The answers to these questions emerge from the different interpretations of the American and French Revolutions that were to be so influential for generations after Burke. In addition, he posed the colonial question in Ireland before it was posed more generally. Was liberty compatible with colonial rule? Ultimately, Burke secured his position by his condemnation of colonial as well as revolutionary violence. But in the works of Burke's contemporaries, especially deTocqueville and Acton, colonial atrocity is condoned or supported while revolutionary violence is condemned out of hand. This, it is argued here, is constitutive of the European anti-revolutionary position which Burke helped to create but to which he nevertheless remains alien.

A collection of essays exploring the future of literary studies by focusing on the relationship between literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The essays aim to break the boundaries separating philosophy and literature.

First published in 1986, A Short History of Irish Literature combines the scholarship of exceptional range and depth with the power to persuade us to read authors we have forgotten or neglected, and to re-read sympathetically those we have insensitively undervalued or dismissed.From the earliest Gaelic poetry to Seamus Heaney and John Montague, from O Bruadair to O’Casey, Professor Deane is an admirable guide. He combines the clarity of the critic with the sensitivity of the poet, remarkably providing refreshing and provocative insights into writers we thought we knew and valued, and resurrecting those who have suffered the eclipse of fashion. All the writing is seen in the context of its period, and its political and cultural environment.As he explores the creative tension that makes the Irish tradition so rich, the author shows how often this tension sprang from the language which was both theirs and that of their colonial overlords. This illuminates the outstanding wealth of the first vernacular literature in Europe—a literature that has given us the drama of Farquhar, Wilde, Shaw and Beckett; the fiction of Joyce; the poetry of Yeats; and that has won three Nobel Prizes. The book is completed by full chronologies which place Irish literature against the background of Irish culture and other contemporary European writing.

Seamus Deane was one of the most vital and versatile authors of our time. Small World presents an unmatched survey of Irish writing, and of writing about Irish issues, from 1798 to the present day. Elegant, polemical, and incisive, it addresses the political, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of several notable literary and historical moments, and monuments, from the island's past and present. The style of Swift; the continuing influence of Edmund Burke's political thought in the USA; the echoing debates about national character; aspects of Joyce's and of Elizabeth Bowen's relation to modernism; memories of Seamus Heaney; analysis of the representation of Northern Ireland in Anna Burns's fiction - these topics constitute only a partial list of the themes addressed by a volume that should be mandatory reading for all those who care about Ireland and its history. The writings included here, from one of Irish literature's most renowned critics, have individually had a piercing impact, but they are now collectively amplified by being gathered together here for the first time between one set of covers. Small World: Ireland, 1798-2018 is an indispensable collection from one of the most important voices in Irish literature and culture.