1st Edition

Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking

Edited By Ian Hickey, Ellen Howley Copyright 2023
278 Pages
by Routledge

278 Pages
by Routledge

278 Pages
by Routledge

Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking examines Seamus Heaney’s poetic engagement with myth from his earliest work to the posthumous publication of Aeneid Book VI . The essays explore the ways in which Heaney creates his own mythic outlook through multiple mythic lenses. They reveal how Heaney adopts a demiurgic role throughout his career, creating a poetic universe that draws on diverse mythic cycles... Read more

Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking

Ian Hickey & Ellen Howley

Transformations


  1. ‘Words that the rest of us can understand’: Heaney and the Eclogue
  2. Meg Tyler


  3. "The Age of Ghosts" and "The Age of Births": Seamus Heaney’s "Route 110" and Tesserae
  4. Eugene O’Brien 


  5. Seamus Heaney’s Shield of Perseus
  6. Brendan Corcoran

    Translations


  7. Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray
  8. Stephen Regan


  9. ‘Greek Gifts’: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, Its Political Contexts and Ethical Imperatives
  10. Michael Parker


  11. ‘Always new to me, always familiar’: mythical re-significations in Heaney’s diction and poetic depictions in Italian
  12. Debora Biancheri

    Transnationalism


  13. ‘Mythologized, Demythologized’: Heaney, Lowell and Becoming-Trickster in Field Work
  14. Michael Hinds


  15. Seamus Heaney: The Burdens and Benefits of Gift - Giving
  16. Henry Hart


  17. Mythic Water in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
  18. Ellen Howley

     

    Transitions


  19. Dante, Heaney and the Hauntological
  20. Ian Hickey


  21. Crossing the Threshold to the Underworld in Heaney’s Late Poetry
  22. Joanne Piavanini 


  23. Self-Elegy from Afar: Emptiness and Anabasis in Seamus Heaney’s Late Work

Magdalena Kay

Biography

Ian Hickey is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College. He also works in the Irish Institute for Catholic Studies in Mary Immaculate College. His first monograph Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry was published by Routledge in 2021 and was joint winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize. He has published numerous journal articles on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan and twenty-first-century Irish writing, as well as on Benjamin Zephaniah in Spoken Word in the UK. He is currently writing his second monograph entitled Fragmentation: Twenty-First Century Irish Poetry and Fiction.

Ellen Howley is Assistant Professor at the School of English, Dublin City University. She has published work in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Comparative Literature and Irish Studies Review on Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others. She co-wrote, with Eugene McNulty, a chapter on Ireland for Europe in British Literature and Culture, edited by Petra Rau and Will Rossiter (Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on a monograph that examines how contemporary Irish and Caribbean poets write about the sea.