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Toward A Northern Irish Pastoral: Reading The Rural In Seamus Heaney And Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Krassenstein

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is three-fold: to mount a comparison of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, arguing that the two poets actually share much in common, particularly in their use of the pastoral mode; to argue that the pastoral mode offers a provocative, even radical platform for postcolonial writing and thinking; and to argue that reading Heaney and Muldoon, and Ireland in general, as postcolonial offers much for critics and scholars. This project looks particularly at Heaney’s use of gender in landscape to argue that Heaney relies on an abject pastoral mode, one which is dominated by excess fertility …