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Seamus Heaney's American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some forty years that Seamus Heaney spent in the U.S. as teacher, as lecturer, as friend and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit.
List of contents
Introduction
1. American Pastoral, 1970-1
2. On the Road, 1971
3. American Burlesque, 1976
4. Heaney at Harvard, 1979
5. On the Road Again, 1979-81
6. Following Heaney, 1983-5
7. The Burden of Fame, 1985-95
8. Hope and History, 1995-2000
9. Grendel Goes to Harvard, 1999-2000
10. An American Tragedy, 2001
Postscript
- Appendix 1: Lecture Tour, 1981 (corrected) arranged by Selma Warner
- Appendix 2: Seamus Heaney’s Scheduled Readings 2001-2014
About the author
Edward O’Shea received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Modern British literature and twentieth-century Irish poetry and fiction. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York, Oswego. O’Shea directed five NEH seminars on the poetry of W.B. Yeats in Ireland. He has held a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship in Kolkata, India. Subsequently, he was awarded a Fulbright at Trinity College, Dublin. There, he lectured on Seamus Heaney at the Heaney exhibition, “Listen Now Again,” at Trinity College, Queen’s College, Belfast, and NUI Galway. He has published extensively on the work of W.B. Yeats and most recently on Seamus Heaney’s first appointment at Berkeley in 1970-71 in Southern California Quarterly.
Summary
Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey describes, with a new archive of correspondence, interviews, and working drafts, the some forty years that Seamus Heaney spent in the U.S. as teacher, as lecturer, as friend and colleague, and as an active poet on the reading circuit.
