“Seamus Deane, who sadly died in May 2021, was a towering figure in Irish intellectual, cultural and literary life. The breadth of his scholarship and the scale of his achievement are unmatched by any post-war literary critic in Ireland and his legacy includes a profound transformation in the conceptualisation of literary culture in Ireland. Deane’s recasting, in the Irish context, of the literary as a thing apart and in-and-of-itself, into writing as a complex feature on a historico-cultural spectrum, was the nub of the immense work of intellectual labour which his career involved…”
Read my full tribute to Seamus Deane via the Irish Humanities Alliance blog here.
Colin Graham 