Rewritings, appropriations, deformations : aspects of intertextuality in contemporary Northern Irish poetry.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the ways in which four Northern Irish poets - Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldixm and Medbh McGuckian - have assimilated, or appropriated, other literary traditions, texts and influences into their own work, and how these appropriations express themes central to their work. A short intrtKiuction sets out the main themes and subjects: how the opening of the space ot these texts through translation and what is called ‘creative appropriation’ links in with the poets continual tussling with the ever-presence of politics and history.

The first chapter focusses on the influence of Robert Lowell and, particularly, Dante on what I argue have proven to be Seamus Heaney’s ‘pivotal collections, Field Work and Station Island: and I relate the notion of ‘translation’ to Heaney’s ideas ot ‘amphibiousness’, of the artist being ‘placed and displaced’. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Tom Paulin has ‘de-formed’ and re-formed his own poetry through assimilating the example of Russian and Eastern European writers, and how translation has also played a part in this. Chapter Three considers Paul Muldoon’s relentless ‘creative appropriations’, his magpie ‘intertextualizing from other authors, as an expression of a central theme in his work: ‘dis-integration . The fourth chapter advances a reading of Medbh McGuckian’s ‘transgressive’ poetry through an analysis of intertexts implicated in it: Freud, W.R. Rixlgers and - in particular - the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. My conclusion endeavours to draw various strands of the thesis together and forwards the idea of Northern Irish poetry proving exceptionally ‘pervious’ to outside influences.