Anthologizing Sir Samuel Ferguson: Literature, History, Politics

• Authors: Jędrzejewski, Jan

Abstracts

EN

Published Online: 2013-10-25; This content is open access.

EN

Although Sir Samuel Ferguson is generally recognized as one of the key figures of mid-nineteenth-century Irish literature, there has been no major edition of his poems since 1916, as a result of which his work tends to be known to the general reader through selections published in anthologies. The essay analyzes the selections of Ferguson’s work in anthologies of Irish literature published between 1895 and 2010 in an attempt to assess the impact of the cultural dynamics of twentieth-century Ireland on the interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement as a poet. The evidence collected demonstrates that the image of Ferguson perpetuated by most twentiethcentury anthologists, most of them Hibernocentric in approach, was that of a respectable if rather old-fashioned Romantic nationalist antiquarian, whose work focused primarily on familiarizing the Victorian reader with the ancient myths and traditions of Ireland. This interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement, motivated, it is argued, by the predominantly nationalist agenda of modern Ireland’s cultural establishment, has largely marginalized the other side of Ferguson—a political thinker committed to the unionist cause and vehemently opposed to the violence perpetrated by the emergent Irish republican movement and culminating in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which formed the subject of two of Ferguson’s most powerful late poems, “At the Polo-Ground” and “In Carey’s Footsteps.”

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 4

Dates

published

2014

Contributors

author

Jędrzejewski, Jan

other

University of Ulster

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Jan Jędrzejewski is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Head of the School of English and History at the University of Ulster, United Kingdom. His areas of interest include Victorian literature, eighteenth-century literature, Irish literature in English, and Anglo-Polish and Hiberno-Polish literary relations. He has published monographs on Thomas Hardy and the Church (1996) and George Eliot (2007), editions of Hardy (in English and Polish) and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as articles on various aspects of modern English and Irish literature, and on literary and cultural links between the British Isles and Poland

other

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Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11089/8546