reading in the dark seamus deane summary

It also advances his determined engagement with the past. This volume is carefully shaped by patterns of departure and return, as the poet moves between local and international experience, trying to make sense of his surroundings through constantly shifting perspectives. Despite its stirring imagery, this early work was criticised for awkward phrasing and syntax, stylistic problems which were overcome in the more mature History Lessons (1983). For Deane too, writing of all kinds is evidence of the individual's implication in the governing processes of history, a premise that defines even private memories and experiences as symbolic of broader political phenomena.ĭeane's early poetry, from Gradual Wars (1972) and Rumours (1977), established both his preoccupations with violence and history, and his formal indebtedness to European and American models. And to an extent, any clear-cut division between his critical and creative work is misleading: both are facets of his commitment to the explication of modern Ireland as a complex postcolonial nation, and both confirm his underlying belief in culture as a compensatory weapon against the deforming effects of violence. The publication in 1996 of his evocative childhood memoir Reading in the Dark, however, secured for him a reputation as a notable creative prose writer. Until recently, Seamus Deane's career as one of Ireland's leading literary critics, particularly his role as editor-in-chief of the landmark Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing(1991-2002), tended to overshadow his output as a poet.

He is editor of the 'Irish Cultural Studies' series for Cork University Press. Set in Derry during the 1950s, the book is narrated by a young boy whose family is haunted by a terrible secret, born out of the political and religious divisions which have blighted the province.

He is editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) and began a volume of autobiography which, at the suggestion of Bill Buford, former editor of Granta magazine, became the prize-winning novel Reading in the Dark (1996), which was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize for Fiction, and won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1997 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction, as well as the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He is the author of several works of criticism, most recently Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (1997), and has published four collections of poetry. He was educated at Queen's University, Belfast and Cambridge University, and now teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Critic, poet and novelist Seamus Deane was born in 1940 in Derry in Northern Ireland.

Reading in the dark seamus deane summary