History in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney with Special Reference to North

Abstract

The traditional-Irish historical vision is oriented towards conceiving the past as an extra-temporal sanctuary in which the Irish nationhood has constantly manifested itself despite apparent defeat. Since history is not to be understood as a series of events occurring as time passes, but as a permanently existing reality, a sense of historical repetition is inevitable. Events are seen as expressing perennial aspects of a condition which involves moral absolutes primordially determined and unaffected by the passage of time. However, the postmodern conception of history rejects any sense of continuity or common experience. History can no longer be seen as a true account of things past or a neutral representation of reality. Postmodernism acknowledges the undecidable in both the past and what is known about the past, thus keeping history open to the endless deferral of repeated narrative reconstruction. Postmodern historicity conceives the subject as shaken out of its secure present and exposed to the shock of a temporality which is always self-divided. History is transformed into an embodiment of the constructed time of a past that has never been present and thus exists only as a repetition. This thesis will challenge the standard critical opinions about the concept of history as expressed in Seamus Heaney's early poetry with special reference to North; It juxtaposes two contrastive conceptions of history to reveal the dual nature of the self-divided and self-rebuking poet.