Breen, Peter Thomas (1993) Place and displacement in the works of Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis seeks to locate Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney within a post-colonial
and postmodern era of writing which is concerned with the problematising of an
effective identifying relationship between self and place. In the first instance, the
study is interested in the response of these two writers, within the literary forms of
drama and poetry, to the recurrence of sectarian and neo-colonial conflict in
Northern Ireland since the nineteen sixties. Obliged to deal with history as a
category, their art emphasises the contest for the naming of people and terrain
which has taken place within language, writing and discourse.
But place for these writers is not only historical and material, it is sensual, familiar
and parochial. The structural and narrative shape of the drama and poetry is that of
a lived, intimate, non-literate engagement with the local particulars of place and a
learned, artistic life which offers insight into that existence. The thesis is interested
in the nature of this modern form of division: the detached, educated mind 'making
strange' the ordinary assimilated life. Men of rural origins who pursue pedagogical
and artistic vocations do not only offer educations in displacement, but contrarily,
realise that language, education and writing generate displacement, uprooting the
individual, and creating divisions in experience and consciousness.
It is the syncretism of this personal experience of rural place, and of parochial and
metropolitan forms of education and culture, with the historical colonial reformation
of the Irish landscape through a culture of modernity which constitutes the main
focus and major contribution in understanding of this thesis to the contemporary
literature and society of Northern Ireland.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Friel, Brian -- Criticism and interpretation, Heaney, Seamus, 1939- -- Criticism and interpretation, Northern Ireland -- In literature, Irish literature -- History and criticism, Place (Philosophy) in literature
Official Date:	May 1993
Dates:	Date Event May 1993 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Larrissy, Edward
Extent:	iv, 298 leaves
Language:	eng

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