He studied English literature and French Enlightenment thought, first at Queen’s University in Belfast, then at Cambridge University. Yet it was to Europe and England that his interest turned. As part of the city’s Catholic minority, he was “highly politicized from the outset,” he notes. He was raised in the North, in a working-class family in Derry. Deane has not focused exclusively on Ireland, however. Also among his publications is A Short History of Irish Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 1986). In Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (Wake Forest University Press, 1987), for example, he emphasized Ireland’s literary resilience despite repeated invasions. Its pamphlets and theatrical productions have greatly influenced the debate on Irish political and cultural issues. The anthology has proved a high point in the work of the Field Day Theatre and Publishing Company, a Derry-based cooperative of writers and scholars, of which Mr. As an act of post-colonial protest, it aimed to reclaim Irish writing long appropriated by the English national literary canon. The Field Day Anthology laid the groundwork for a re-evaluation of the place of writing in Irish history. That will immediately set it apart from all but a few Irish-studies programs in this country. The Irish-studies program at Notre Dame, too, will deal with writing from the whole 1,500-year expanse of Irish literary history, in Irish as well as English–and not just “the Golden Oldies: Yeats, Joyce, maybe Synge and O’Casey,” as Mr. (A fourth volume, containing the work of woman writers exclusively, is being prepared.) It has been widely acclaimed as the most important Irish publication in decades. ![]() ![]() Norton, 1991), a three-volume compendium of writing from the sixth century to the present. He was general editor, for example, of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (W. Deane, a professor of modern English and American literature at University College, Dublin, rests on a broad range of achievements. Last fall, Seamus Deane, a renowned literary scholar, was invited to Notre Dame to remedy that lack, aided by a $2.5-million gift to the university. Yet until now, the most identifiably Catholic institution in the country–one where 14 of 16 presidents have been priests of Irish birth or descent–has never had an Irish-studies program. The University of Notre Dame, the home of the Fighting Irish, is the sentimental alma mater of many more actual and would-be Irish-Americans than ever have studied here. Seamus Deane, a renowned literary scholar, fills a void at Notre Dame
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