Mythologising the Contemporary Ireland in North Heaney as the Modernist Postcolonial Poet

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assiociate Professor, English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, I.R. Iran

2 Assistance Professor, English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, I.R.Iran

3 Student / University of Tehran

Abstract

In his collection North, Heaney mythologizes the contemporary history of the people of Northern Ireland through conflating the mythological history of the people of Ireland, with the 1960s Troubles in Northern Ireland. Used by the modernist poets, the method of representing the contemporary history through recourse to mythology have been also favored by poets who have experienced colonial and postcolonial conditions. Though this method helps the people who live in postcolonial conditions to re-construct their ruined history through recourse to the past and national myths, it problematizes their understanding of the contemporary times, as the identification of the past and myth with the present undermines the distinctions which exist between the causes of murder and violence in the past and in the present. Hence, Not only Heaney’s mythologizing the present which conflates modernism with postcolonial historiography cannot resolve the socio-political problems in Northern Ireland, it reinforces violence in the society.

Keywords


Bhabha, Homi. K. (1994). The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Bloom, Harold. (2003). Seamus Heaney, Broomall: Chelsea House,.
Broom, Sarah. (2006). Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, New York: Palgrave.
Brown, Terence. (2010). The Literature of Ireland Culture and Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Campbell, Matthew. ed. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, New York: Cambridge UP.
Carson, Ciaran. (1975).  "Escaped from the Massacre?", Honest Ulsterman 50: 183-6.
Corcoran, Neil.(1993). English Poetry Since 1940, New York: Longman.
Cuda, Anthony J. (2005). The Use of Memory: Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, and the Unpublished Epigraph to ‘North’ Journal of Modern Literature 28-4: 152-175.
Denard, Hugh. (2000). Seamus Heaney, Colonialism and the Cure: Sophoclean Re-Visions. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22-3: 1-18.
Eagleton Terry. (1995). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, London: Verso.
Grant, Patrick. (2001) Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968-98. New York:
 Palgrave.
Hardwick, Lorna. P. (2002). Classical Texts in Post-Colonial Literatures: Consolation, Redress and New Beginnings in the Work of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9-2: 236-56.
Hart, Henry. (1989). Myth, and Apocalypse in Seamus Heaney’s ‘North’, Contemporary Literature 30-3: 387-411.
Harvey, David. (1992). The Condtions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Heaney, Seamus. (1999). Beowulf: A New Translation. London: Faber and Faber,.
--- . (1975). North, London: Faber and Faber.
---. (1980). Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and Faber.
---. (1972). Wintering Out, London: Faber and Faber.
Hutcheon, Linda.( 1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge,
Ingelbien, Raphael. (1999). Mapping the Misreadings: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Nationhood. Contemporary Literature 40-4: 627-58.
Longley, Edna. ( 1986). Poetry in the Wars, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bllodaxe.
Mathews,Aiden, C. (1985). Review of Station Island and Sweeney Astray, PoetryIreland Review, No. 14, 83.
McCourt, John. ed. (2009). James Joyce in Context, New York: Cambridge UP.
Miller, Nicholas A. ( 2002). Modernism, Ireland, and the Erotics of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
Rutherford, Jonathan. (1998). The Third Space, an Interview with Homi Bhabha. Identity, Community, 
Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence.
Sandhu, Angie. (2007). Intellectuals and the People, New York: Palgrave.
Tobin, Daniel. (1999). Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.