Books by S. Matthews

A wide-ranging collection of the key contextual documents which inform the Modernist period of Anglo-American literature. Documents are supported by substantial editorial material drawing connections to the major Modernist texts, and a full introduction outlining the key events, social and political movements, and cultural issues of the time.

The award of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature to Seamus Heaney recognized not only the aesthetic achievement of his work, but also its political urgency. Here Steven Matthews presents a genealogy of Irish poetry which centres upon Heaney's recent preoccupation with the relations between poetry, politics and history.

By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats's significance as the founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the century.