Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger

Description

This study considers writing within the cultural context of Northern Ireland and discusses how writing creates a sense of community, and the different forms this takes when written from loyalist or republican perspectives. The book takes its major theoretical energy from readings of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Walter Benjamin's work on historiography. hese are applied to major writers such as Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon and Edna Longley and to institutions such as the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Contents Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: The Interregnum, the Institution and the Critic 2. ‘In the Midst of All this Dross’ : Establishing the Grounds of Dissent 3. ‘This Thing Could Rule the World’: Northern Writing and the Idea of Coterie 4. ‘Unconscious Partitionism’: Northern Criticism in the Eighties 5. ‘Nothing Left but the Sense of Exhaustion’: Field Day and Counter-hegemony 6. ‘Just Another Twist in the Plot’: Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and the Final Institution Works Cited Index