Sweeney Astray

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne - the first complete translation since 1913. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature. Sweeney Astray not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibne. Its hero, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. Heaney's translation not only restores to us a work of historical and literary importance but offers the genius of one of our greatest living poets to reinforce its claims on the reader of contemporary literature.

Seamus Heaney's engagement with medieval literature constitutes a significant body of work by a major poet including a landmark translation of "Beowulf". This title examines both Heaney's direct translations and his adaptation of medieval material in his original poems.

Readers of this volume will be struck by the pervasiveness of the connections between the medieval and the modern in Ireland and the Irish, artists in particular, and realize why James Joyce could hardly avoid linking the modern Irish artist with the medieval Irish monk, as he does in the bitter musings of Stephen Dedalus, who walks alone into eternity along Sandymount Strand: "You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus." Contents: Introduction, Richard Wall; The Image Of The IrishóMedieval and ModernóContinuity and Change, F.X. Martin, O.S.A.; John Bull's Other Ego: Reactions to the Stage Irishman in Anglo-Irish Drama, Heinz Kosok; Contemporary Irish Poetry and The Matter of IrelandóThomas Kinsella, John Montague and Seamus Heaney, Brian John; Early Irish Literature and Contemporary Scholarly Disciplines, Ann Dooley; Brian Friel's Translations: National and Universal Dimensions, Wolfgang Zach; Brian Moore and The Meaning of Exile, Hallvard Dahlie; Medieval Irish Poetics: Linguistic Interaction and Audience, Toni O'Brien Johnson; The Artifice of Eternity: Medieval Aspects of Modern Irish Literature, John Wilson Foster; Notes; Notes on Contributors; Index^R

This is the second of four collections of essays intended to be published under the general title Studies in Contemporary Irish Literature (only two were) which are devoted to critical analysis of Irish writing since the 1950s.

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 from Greco-Roman to Irish and Norse to Native American. In doing so, this collection is in dialogue with recent work on Heaney’s engagement with myth. However, it is unique in its wide-ranging perspective, extending beyond Ancient and Classical influences. In its focus on Heaney’s personal metamorphosis of several mythic cycles, this collection reveals more fully the poet’s unique approach to mythmaking, from his engagement with the act of translation to transnational influences on his work and from his poetic transformations to the poetry’s boundary-crossing transitions. Combining the work of established Heaney scholars with the perspectives of early-career researchers, this collection contains a wealth of original scholarship that reveals Heaney’s expansive mythic mind. Mythmaking, an act for which Heaney has faced severe criticism, is reconsidered by all contributors, prompting multifaceted and nuanced readings of the poet’s work.

Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms explores the ways Irish and Scottish literatures have influenced each other from the 1760s onwards. Although an early form of Celticism disappeared with the demise of the Celtic Revivals of Ireland and Scotland, the 'Celtic world' and the 'Celtic temperament' remained key themes in central texts of Irish and Scottish literature well into the twentieth century. Richard Barlow examines the emergence, development, and transformation of Celticism within Irish and Scottish writing and identifies key connections between modern Irish and Scottish authors and texts. By reading works from figures such as James Macpherson, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Fiona Macleod, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney in their political and cultural contexts, Barlow provides a new account of the characteristics and phases of literary Celticism within Romanticism, Modernism, and beyond.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.