Northern Irish poetry and the news

Reading poems alongside news coverage of the Troubles and the ensuing peace process, the thesis argues that Northern Irish poetry has, in fact, been profoundly affected by print journalism and by photojournalistic and televisual images.<br><br>The first chapter of the thesis discusses Heaney’s and Longley’s early responses to the Troubles, arguing that their attempts to move beyond ‘journalistic’ representations of violence were often deeply fraught.

With its second chapter, the thesis turns to the culture of global news that emerged in the 1960s, testing Mahon’s and Muldoon’s appraisals of ‘the Richter Scale / Of world events’. The thesis’s third chapter considers the news’s basic currency of events, showing that, for Carson and McGuckian, ‘objective’ accounts are liable to dissolve into fragmentary assemblages. With its fourth chapter, the thesis examines the coverage of the Northern Ireland peace process and the clichéd ‘talk’ that has attended it.

It argues for the complexity of poetry’s response to what Heaney calls ‘media-speak’. A coda on Flynn’s poetry concludes the thesis. Looking back on Heaney’s and MacNeice’s work, Flynn offers poetic form as something that might resist the fragmentation and ephemerality of media discourse.<br><br><i>Thesis is embargoed until 31st July 2030</i>.<br><br>