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“... Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’, the country’s most significant and influential critic, Seamus Deane, has criticised the way in which an acceptance of ‘the mystique of Irish-ness’ can involve readers in the ‘spiritual heroics’ of a Yeats or a Pearse. The result is a belief in ‘the incarnation of the nation in the individual’. ...”

“... One of her objections to the ‘Field Day’ standpoint has already been mooted in the essay on Seamus Heaney’s North: she dislikes the practice of equating one set of circumstances with another, without sufficiently allowing for the differences between the two. Hence, she says, Heaney’s Iron Age Danish excavations yield up material so alien to ...”

“... Its resemblance to The Turn of the Screw can scarcely be an accident, given the care and extent of Seamus Deane’s own reading, in the dark and elsewhere. But there is another way of looking at the resemblance. It is possible that Aunt Katie and the narrator within James’s story are both in touch with a world of legend, always present but taking on a ...”

“... of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North.’ Not so. It was the Royal ...”

“... When​ the posthumous Collected Poems of W.H. Auden appeared in 1976, Seamus Heaney wrote an appreciative review for the magazine Hibernia in which he tolda story about a Ballymena listener calling the BBC one morning in 1969, after the Northern Ireland news had given a lot of coverage to speeches by civil rights leaders the previous evening ...”

“... or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a good way. Stepping Stones is not quite Heaney’s autobiography: it is, instead, a long collection of interviews, revised collaboratively, in which Heaney describes each phase of his life. Only a poet of ...”

“... mauled its vulgarity and provincialism in the formal modernity and impersonality of his work. Seamus Deane has described how an Irish literature of dissent registers alienation but is not a literature of alienation. In the formal habits of their narratives its authors conspire with and sustain the inertia they claim to despise. From this charge Brian ...”

“... consciousness is flatly announced: ‘Even now there are places where a thought might grow.’ As Seamus Deane has pointed out, Mahon’s poems are neither conceptual nor sensual but equidistant from both. As in Redon’s paintings, the forms are like thoughts coming into being, as if prepared to luxuriate for ever in their own formation – ‘What ...”

“... modern, urban Irish literati, as it is sometimes held against authors like Brian Friel and Seamus Deane. This is because in their case, but not in his, the backward glance to rural Ireland is associated with a currently unfashionable republicanism. On Canaan’s Side is a less impressive piece of fiction than A Long Long Way and The Secret ...”

“... His successor in the Chair of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, Seamus Deane, has contributed to this work of revision, which is represented here as an un-Irish activity. Denis Donoghue’s refusal to assist the work adds a dislike of Marx to his dislike of Freud. ‘It is easy to denounce the Christian Brothers’ to ...”

“... This, it seems, is what Foster is getting at in his nicely imprecise subtitle: ‘c.1970-2000’. Seamus Deane tells a winning story of how, as a bookish child much given to reading the encyclopedia, he became fascinated with that place called Circa, where so many interesting things had happened, and over such a long period of time. In the curious ...”

“... of Joyce has become almost as intense in recent years as the battle for the GPO in Easter Week. Seamus Deane and Kiberd, both of whom have edited Penguin editions of Joyce’s fiction, have made efforts to dragoon him into the soldiers of destiny. In his essay on Joyce in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ...”

“... to Unionism find themselves being given a radically different identity in translation. As Seamus Deane has pointed out (LRB, Vol. 5, No 7), the translator has been of extraordinary importance in Irish writing. There is a long tradition of translation from Irish Gaelic into Irish English, and the result is ‘a kind of interstitial literature ...”

“... or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature of its structure. Thus a poem could be read in the same way by a student in Kenya, at ...”

“... was too distant, and the world that grew out of it too interesting and close and dramatic. As Seamus Deane writes in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, the literature and the politics of the Irish Revival achieved ‘the remarkable feat of ignoring the Famine and rerouting the claim for cultural exceptionalism ...”