Irish Studies – serie

David Stifter's Sengoidelc (Shan-goy-delth) provides a comprehensive introduction to Old Irish grammar and metrics. Ideally suited for use as a course text and as a guide for the independent learner, this exhaustive handbook is also an invaluable reference work for students of Indo-European philology and historical linguistics. The author's step-by-step presentation in an engaging styles lead the novice through the idiosyncracies of the language, such as initial mutations and the double inflection of verbs. Filled with translation exercises based on selections from Old Irish texts, the book provides a practical introduction to the language and its rich history. Sengoidelc opens the door to the fascinating world of Old Irish literature, famous not only for such gems as the Tain Bo Cuailgne (The Cattle Raid of Cuailgne) or the lyrical nature poetry but also as a major source for the political and legal history of Ireland.

Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was in the forefront of the Irish Literary Revival along with William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, AE (George Russell), and John Millington Synge. At the age of twenty-three he was a founding father of the Abbey Players, and he was recognized as one of the most talented young writers of drama, poetry, and short fiction. Unfortunately, Colum quarreled with Yeats and Lady Gregory, and, since he could not earn a living in Dublin by writing alone, he left forAmerica.Colum's contribution to Irish letters is unique, because he alone of the early giants of the Irish Literary Revival was Roman Catholic, peasant born, and country bred. His literary themes are tributes to the indomitable Irish spirit, the natural nobility of the Irish peasant, the ancient folk customs of the countryside, and the poetic beauty of Irish English.

Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors’ own ethnic point of view. The struggle for success forms the underlying structure in the stories by O’Hara, Curran, and McCarthy; and the changing values the New World imposes on the individual are seen in Edwin O’Connor’s Grand Day for Mr. Garvey.Irish wit and black humor pepper all the stories, as represented by Dunn’s bartender-philosopher, Dooley, and Donleavy’s Fairy Tale of New York. Catholicism is omnipresent and is often characterized by the priest, as in Fitzgerald’s Benediction, Power’s Bill, and Flaherty’s Fogarty. Themes that have an immense effect on the characters’ relationships are their difficulties in communicating with one another, which Gill captures succinctly in The Cemetery, and the repositioning of gender roles, so evident in Cullinan’s Life After Death and in Costello’s Murphy’s Xmas.Finally, there are the intense, often contradictory, feelings the characters have toward their "homeland:" Hamill’s Gift illustrates the desire to rid Ireland of British rule; Gordon’s "neighborhood" shows the immigrants’ embarrassment over their origins.Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century. Thus, the selections illustrate the progression of Irish-American literature and also fulfill the word of William Kennedy, who said of his own writing: "those who came before helped to show me how to turn experience into literature."

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature—the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is—one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

The landscape of Ireland is rich with ancient carved stone crosses, tomb-shrines, Romanesque churches, round towers, sundials, beehive huts, Ogham stones and other monuments, many of them dating from before the 12th century. The purpose and function of these artifacts have often been the subject of much debate. Peter Harbison proposes in this book a radical hypothesis: that a great many of these relics can be explained in terms of ecclesiastical pilgrimage.He has constructed a fascination theory about the palace of pilgrimage in the early Christian period, placing it right at the center of communal life. The monuments themselves make much better sense if it looked at in this light—as having come into existence not through the practices of ascetic monks but because of the activities of pilgrims.He begins by searching the historical sources in detail for evidence of early pilgrimage sites. By examining their monuments he projects the findings to other locations where pilgrimage has not been documented. He goes on to describe monument-types of every kind and to identify pilgrims in sculpture surviving from before AD 1200.The Dingle Peninsula in Kerry proves to be a microcosm of pilgrimage monuments, enabling the author to reconstruct a tradition of maritime pilgrimage activity up and down the west coast of Ireland. Indeed, the famous medieval traveler's tale of the fabulous voyage of the St Brendan the Navigator can now be seen as the literary expression of a longstanding maritime pilgrimage along the Atlantic seaways of Ireland and Scotland, reaching Iceland, Greenland, and even North America.

The story of Frank O'Connor is that of a shy child from a Cork slum who becomes aware that there is something beyond the confines of his life and the lives around him, something grander. And with resolve and labor, he makes his way toward it. From his childhood to the time of his release from imprisonment as a revolutionary, O 'Connor conveys the moral fortune and the tragic elements of life, that sparked his storytelling—a life he describes as a "celebration of those who for me represented all I should ever know of God."

This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.

An evocotive tale of coming to womanhood in the disorienting 1960s-a girl in the world of nuns and the Holy Ghost-but on a deeper level, this is a story of a woman who has suffered unimaglnable loss and attempts to make sense of that loss by re-imagining her past and her own Irish-American heritage. The first in her family born in the United States, Maureen grew up the ""Bronx Irish"" daughter of two unforgettable immigrants: her storytelling, former revolutionary father, and her fierce, IRA-supporting mother. Crossing Higbbridge is framed by the accidental death of Waters's son and her struggle to make sense of this loss by re-imagining her past and her heritage. Her life in postwar New York City was colored by Catholicism and strong cultural links to ""the other side"" - by Irish step dancing, the melodies of Thomas Moore, and the rituals, inflections, and harrowing memories impressed on her. Sex was a mystery. Schoolgirls wore below-the-knee blue serge uniforms with starched white collars and cuffs. Brutal treatment at the hands of the hands of the nuns who ran her college drove Waters to transfer to a secular school. Waters rebelled against an upbringing that seemed to wall her off from the twentieth century. She married outside the church, divorced, and became a scholar and professor at the City University of New York. Waters follows in the tradition of her father with this vividly humorous and moving true tale.

In this anaysis of Roddy Doyle's first five novels, Caramine White argues that while Doyle is undoubtedly one of the most popular contemporary novelists, he also needs to be seen as a serious snd gifted writer. She offers an overview of Doyle's work followed by a chapter devoted to the critical analysis of each of the five novels in which she scrutinizes Doyle's innovative use of language; his manipulation of his audience's reaction via comedy and humour; the role, however slight, of religion and politics; and his overall social vision as projected in each book and as part of a complete body of work.

This work is a portrait of the life of the elder Yeats and his family, showing that J.B. Yeats was as worthy of his sons as they were of their father.

This is the story of a self-educated, charismatic, gifted leader who overcame personal tragedy in childhood and was elected the youngest mayor of a major city in America at age twenty-six. It is the story of a reformer who possessed a genius for politics. James K. McGuire (1868–1923) was elected mayor of Syracuse three times as a Democrat in a Republican bastion. As a candidate for governor in 1898, he nearly derailed the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. His ideas and positions informed the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in his quest for the presidency and the platform of the Democratic Party in those elections. Fahey narrates McGuire’s remarkable rise to become a major figure in national politics as well as his questionable business dealings along the way. Indicted twice during his life, he was investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice for his advocacy of Irish freedom. McGuire befriended and aided Éamon de Valera and the Irish freedom fighters of that time, using his influence at the highest levels of the American government to further the cause of Ireland. This fascinating portrait reveals a complex man who earned a place on the national political stage and battled for the causes in which he deeply believed.

The first biography of Asenath Nicholson, Compassionate Stranger recovers the largely forgotten history of an extraordinary woman. Trained as a schoolteacher,Nicholson was involved in the abolitionist, temperance, and diet reforms of the day before she left New York in 1844 ""to personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor."" She walked alone throughout nearly every county in Ireland and reported on conditions in rural Ireland on the eve of the Great Irish Famine. She published Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, an account of her travels in 1847. She returned to Ireland in December 1846 to do what she could to relieve famine suffering - first in Dublin and then in the winter of 1847-48 in the west of Ireland where the suffering was greatest. Nicholson’s precise, detailed diaries and correspondence reveal haunting insights into the desperation of victims of the Famine and the negligence and greed of those who added to the suffering. Her account of the Great Irish Famine, Annals of the Famine in Ireland in 1847, 1848 and 1849, is both a record of her work and an indictment of official policies toward the poor: land, employment,famine relief. In addition to telling Nicholson’s story, from her early life in Vermont and upstate New York to her better-known work in Ireland, Murphy puts Nicholson’s own writings and other historical documents in conversation. This not only contextualizes Nicholson’s life and work, but it also supplements the impersonal official records with Nicholson’s more compassionate and impassioned accounts of the Irish poor.

Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of "finder"—a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form—Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.

Teaching John McGahern's The Dark provide an indispensable companion to the classic Irish novel. With an introduction aimed at first-time readers and four critical essays, this edition guides readers through the novel’s famously controversial history. While The Dark was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, scholars now demonstrate that McGahern’s novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland—from the family to the church, to the government’s willingness to ignore national and communal trauma. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national identity. An invaluable resource, this edition gives students and scholars a rich source of contextualizing material to address the themes and significance of McGahern’s complex novel.

Oceanic Connections is a first-of-its-kind comparative study of Anglophone Irish and Caribbean poets who write widely about the sea, revealing the similarities across the poetic traditions of both regions. In turning to the sea, Ellen Howley applies a Blue Humanities lens to the work of major poets from Ireland and the Anglophone Caribbean, such as Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Seamus Heaney, and Medbh McGuckian. She demonstrates how the sea is more than a backdrop or metaphor—it is a generative space of creative and historical meaning. Through careful analysis, Howley shows how poets from these geographically distant but culturally resonant regions engage with the ocean’s material realities and mythic depths. Howley navigates between concrete maritime experiences—sailors, shipwrecks, coastal labor—and the sea’s profound metaphorical potential. Poets become cartographers of both physical and imaginative spaces, mapping connections that span continents and centuries. Oceanic Connections reveals how the ocean simultaneously represents historical trauma, cultural memory, and a site of transformative artistic expression. Building on studies of Irish-Caribbean connections by Michael Malouf, Lee M. Jenkins, Stephanie Pocock Boeninger, Allison Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan, this study furthers the comparative conversation through its emphasis on poetic resemblances, illuminating surprising commonalities while honoring each tradition’s unique voice.

Fitness for Freedom explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore "not fit for freedom." Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception that Ireland’s racial stocks were depleted, and that those who remained were feeble and few. The fraught relationship between disability and Irishness provides context for Quirici’s analysis of modernist Irish literature. Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, and the Gaelic Athletic Association created new mythologies of Irish ability to counter imperial stereotypes, tacitly reinforcing the idea of disability as a disqualification for sovereignty. Certain Irish modernists, however—James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Nolan, and Christy Brown—called the "fitness for freedom" ideology into question. These authors allow us to disentangle disability from unfitness and scrutinize its relationship to liberation. In their work, disability becomes an avenue for exploring the human experience and discovering the inherent creativity and collaborative potential of an interdependent life.

Irish folklore is replete with images of the monstrous feminine. The wandering witch, the wailing banshee, the mysterious changeling and others recur throughout folktales and have become well-known through contemporary depictions in books and on screens. In the wake of recent feminist thinking, online movements, and revelations of gender-based violence in state institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, women writers in Ireland and abroad have found new ways to adapt this folklore, addressing the underlying tensions inherent to these stories and reevaluating traditional myths.In Banshees, Hags, and Changelings, Molly Ferguson examines how women writers and the recent cultural feminist reckoning in Ireland allow for a reappraisal of the subjects of these folktales and the anxieties they address. Exploring contemporary works, with attention paid to examples in science fiction and YA literature, Ferguson identifies the cultural processing of trauma resulting from gender-based violence through reconsiderations of the monstrous and the tensions that lie beneath each tale.

In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature is deeply engaged with climate change issues. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works and their concern with realms of the political, the economic, and the ecological. The association of greenness with Ireland and its role in the corporatization of Ireland Inc. has been robustly critiqued to reveal the underbelly of Ireland’s unsustainable energy and food regimes and its distressing environmental record with international climate change mitigation efforts. Writing in the shadow of such emissions, contemporary authors are alert not only to the insincerity of pastoralist rhetoric and the instrumentalized greenery of Irish fiction, but they are also responding to the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the Anthropocene. The Irish canon has historically played a crucial role in Irish nationalism, and these works are often written at a time when questions of statehood and citizenship are increasingly at the forefront of Irish and geopolitical discourses. Sen argues that Ireland’s fraught nationhood—and its resulting literature—can be used as a framework to analyze the ubiquitous, multigenerational scale of the climate crisis. Cleverly written and groundbreaking in scope, Sen’s analyses dissect the connection between Irish sovereignty, its literature, and the urgent climate disaster.

Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel traces the cultural shift that began in the 1980s and continues through new ideological structures, new ways of telling stories, and a radically transformed sense of the very meaning of Irishness. This period of relentless disruption of Ireland's social, demographic, religious, and economic frames also offered immense imaginative possibilities to its writers. In direct contrast to the longer history of Irish writing’s persistent fascination with stasis, insularity, tradition, and paralysis, this volume addresses one of the most tumultuous periods of social transformation in Irish history. Defined more by change and structural transformation as the guiding principles, this is a period of shifting values, a reimagining of cultural frames, and a rewriting of the primary narratives of what it meant to be Irish. Bringing together scholars from across the field, Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel explores the anxieties expressed and examined within Irish contemporary novels to offer a complete contextualized reading that traces vital changes in Irish government, economy, social values, and national identity.

The binary between a united Ireland and the current form of partition has provoked writers and scholars and established an important debate about what unity would look like. Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe charts and critically discusses the challenges of articulating unity while one-sided discourses—on either nationalist or unionist grounds—have gradually been integrating an Irish identity that finds itself between Britain and Europe. Crucial to all of this is the role of writers in reimagining Irish writing before and after the Northern Ireland peace process and in reconstituting an idea of Irish unity in their works. Maurice Fitzpatrick, Christoph Reinfandt, and Raphael Zähringer bring together scholars from the fields of philosophy, political science, diplomacy, history, and literary and cultural studies to interpret how the concept of unity has manifested in literary, historical, and political texts. This wide-ranging approach considers a variety of economic perspectives, including how generations of economic shifts have impacted the image of Ireland’s relationship with the UK and Europe. Ultimately, Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe provides coordinates for current debates about how to prepare for Irish unity and what shape it should or could take.

Too often, fleeting moments rooted in queer experience have appeared in popular fiction, only to be little remarked upon, often noted only as a sign of continuing neoliberal social advances. In Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature, Patrick Mullen makes the case for a more personal analysis of these moments, finding ways for readers to create new meaning and explore closer readings of key texts. Queer Possessions is divided between close readings of modern Irish novels and films and creative readings of the same texts, to give readers the tools to engage more deeply with the process of analysis and criticism. In the first mode, Mullen examines how modern Irish literature has frequently featured comedy to represent queer sexuality and economic crisis in the twenty-first century. This analysis allows for the second mode, in which the text helps readers to assume a critical role, encouraging their own creative readings of texts and imagining more of the works. Equal parts critical and playful, Queer Possessions works to rediscover misplaced queer history, encourage new forms of experiencing text, and empower readers to create new interpretations and works.

Although much has been written about American feminism and its influence on culture and society, very little has been recorded about the key role played by Irish American women writers in exposing women’s issues, protecting their rights, and anticipating, if not effecting, change. Like the mythical Irish banshee who delivered forewarnings of imminent death, Irish American women, through their writing, have repeatedly warned of the death of women’s rights. These messages carried the greatest potency at liminal times when feminism was under attack due to the politics of civil society, the government, or the church. The Banshees traces the feminist contributions of a wide range of Irish American women writers, from Mother Jones, Kate Chopin, and Margaret Mitchell to contemporary authors such as Gillian Flynn, Jennifer Egan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin. To illustrate the growth and significance of their writing, the book is organized chronologically by decade. Each chapter details the progress and setbacks of Irish American women during that period by revealing key themes in their novels and memoirs contextualized within a discussion of contemporary feminism, Catholicism, Irish American history, American politics, and society. The Banshees examines these writers’ roles in protecting women’s sovereignty, rights, and reputations. Thanks to their efforts, feminism is revealed as a fundamental element of Irish American literary history. The expanded edition includes a new afterword by the author that considers the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

What does it mean to be of Irish descent? What does Irish descent stand for in Ireland? In Northern Ireland? In the United States? How are the categories of "native" and "settler" and accounts of ethnic origin being refigured through popular genealogy and population genetics? Of Irish Descent addresses these questions by exploring the contemporary significance of ideas about ancestral roots, origins, and connections. Moving from the intimacy of family stories and reunions to disputed state policies on noble titles and new applications of genetic research, Nash traces the place of ancestry in interconnected geographies of identity—familial, ethnic, national, and diasporic. Underlying these different practices and narratives are potent and profoundly political questions about who counts as Irish and to whom Ireland belongs. Examining tensions between ideas of plurality and commonality, difference and connection that run through the culture and science of ancestral origins, Of Irish Descent is an original and timely exploration of new configurations of nation and diaspora as communities of shared descent. The expanded edition includes a new foreword by the author.

The Irish writers of the 1890s—Somerville and Ross, George Moore, Edward Martyn, George Russell, and William Butler Yeats—repeatedly sought to define for their literature and nation a messianic hero and thus to help shape the political and social consciousness of the Irish people.Wayne Hall examines the writing of this decade within its economic and political context, especially the relationship of literature to the issues of land reform and the decline of the Protestant Ascendancy in late nineteenth-century Ireland.Literature and politics tenuously joined forces early in the decade. But the writers came increasingly to identify their own interests with those of the old social order and the landed gentry. They deplored the materialism and egalitarianism that was sweeping aside the manorial past, and as a way of preserving, at least temporarily, the values associated with economic feudalism, they brought to the vanishing way of life its finest artistic expression.The 1890s thus proved to be a crucial transition period, and later Irish writers took many of their themes and literary concerns from this decade. The early stages of the Irish Renaissance also exemplify a problem recurring throughout twentieth-century Western art—the alienation of the artist from society. Failingto unite with and transform the actual circumstances of Ireland, the writers responded by retreating from itand by substituting instead myths of their own making.

The Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (often known in English as Finn MacCool) has had a long life. First cited in Old Irish chronicles from the early Christian era, he became the central hero of the Fenian Cycle which flourished in the high Middle Ages. Stories about Fionn and his warriors continue to be told by storytellers in Ireland and in Gaelic Scotland to this day.This book traces the development of Fionn's persona in Irish and Scottish texts and constructs a heroic biography of him. As aspects of the hero are borrowed into English and later world literature, his personality undergoes several changes. Seen as less than admirable, he may become either a buffoon or a blackguard. Somehow these contradictions exist side by side.Among the writers in English most interested in Fionn are James Macpherson, the "translator" of The Poems of Ossian ( 17601, William Carleton, the first great fiction writer of nineteenth-century Ireland, and Fiann O'Brien, the multifaceted author of At Swim-Two-Birds. Aspects of Fiann appear as far apart as Mendelssohn's "Hebrides (or Fingal 's Cave) Overture" and a contemporary rock opera. But the most complex use of Fionn's story in modernliterature is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

In the last twenty-five years, there has been a revolution in literary study in the English-speaking world involving two related shifts in understanding. One is the recognition that the study of literature requires a theoretical grounding, and the other is an acknowledgement that such a grounding is contingent upon the realization that ours is a postmodernist world. Despite much resistance from traditional literary historians and formalist critics, both of these assumptions influence many of today's most forceful and insightful academic literary analyses.Yet, Yeats scholarship has remained largely embedded in traditional modes of critical theory. For the first time, this collection of original essays applies a wide spectrum of contemporary critical theories to major works in the Yeats canon, serving as models of how to read and work with Yeats from a postmodernist/poststructuralist perspective.R. B. Kershner, for example, uses Bakhtin and medical/psychological studies of dyslexia to consider the written versus the oral and the inner dialogization of Yeats's writing; Cheryl Herr provides a juxtaposition of the major concepts of Foucault's work, especially the notion of the episteme from The Order of Things as applied to Yeats's Vision; and Ronald Schleifer considers the designing gestures of postmodern rhetoric found in Yeats, using the work of Lyotard, Jameson, O'Hara, and Derrida.These and other provocation essays, which challenge us to rethink out most basic notions of how to read Yeats, offer ample evidence of the remarkable new perceptions that can be gained from applying poststructuralist criticism to Yeats.

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.