1st Edition

Seamus Heaney and Contemporary Elegy

By Huiwen Shi Copyright 2026
200 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Seamus Heaney and Contemporary Elegy is the first book to examine Seamus Heaney’s engagements, experiments, and revisions of the elegy as a major lyric genre. Through interpreting the elegiac work of Seamus Heaney, one of the largest single bodies of contemporary lyric elegy, this book proposes a major shift of attention: away from the subject and toward the elegiac object. The author develops... Read more

Introduction              Ethics and Elegy                                                                                                                                            

Chapter 1                   Barely Elegies: Heaney’s Acts of Redress in War Poetry    

Chapter 2                   Spatial Embarrassment: Straining the Elegiac Sonnets

Chapter 3                   Terza Rima Elegies and Spatial Expansion               

Chapter 4                   ‘Failed’ Elegies: The Nonhuman, the Bog Bodies Poems,   

and the ‘Intransitive’ Ecological Elegy

Conclusion                 Heaney and Beyond               

Biography

Huiwen Shi is Senior Lecturer in the Division of Languages and Communication at the College of Professional and Continuing Education, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She completed her PhD in English Literature at the School of English, University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in contemporary poetics, storytelling, and literary education.