Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking

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.

Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking

Ian Hickey & Ellen Howley

Transformations






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






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






Seamus Heaney’s Shield of Perseus
Brendan Corcoran

Translations






Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray
Stephen Regan






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






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

Transnationalism






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






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






Mythic Water in Seamus Heaney’s Poetry
Ellen Howley



Transitions






Dante, Heaney and the Hauntological
Ian Hickey






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






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

Magdalena Kay