Shi, Huiwen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-116). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii / 摘要 --- p.iii / List of Abbreviations --- p.v / Chapter Chapter One: --- Introduction: an Opening --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- "Departure and Discovery: ""Revelation of the Self to the Self""" --- p.11 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- "Archaeology: ""Restoration of the Culture to Itself""" --- p.38 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- "Reflection and Imagination: ""Harmonious Reproduction of the Self""" --- p.78 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion: Continuity --- p.108 / Bibliography: --- p.112

Li Chit-Ning. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-104). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii / 摘要 --- p.iv / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Self in Childhood and Nature --- p.14 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Identification and Self-identity --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter Four --- A Voice and the Nature --- p.60 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Frameworks Dissolving into Uncertainty --- p.79 / Conclusion --- p.99 / Works Cited --- p.101 / Bibliography --- p.103

Seamus Heaney's 1979 volume of poems, Field Work, contains ten sonnets written while the Northern Irish author lived for four years in a nineteenth-century cottage near Dublin. These sonnets, dealing with art, language, nature, and politics, reflect Heaney's major themes and are typical of his poetic techniques. This study analyzes the content of the ten sonnets as well as their technical aspects.

The costume design for the University of Central Florida Conservatory Theatre‘s production of Seamus Heaney‘s The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone took an ancient Greek classic by Sophocles and infused it with influences from avant-garde theatre. This thesis documents the process of designing the costumes from academic, artistic, and technical aspects. Through this process, I explored how to communicate abstract ideas about humanity into actual costumes and how multiple cultural heritages can be intertwined in a united visual which pushes the audience to think more critically about the story. The recurring themes of duality are central to the final costume design: silk chiffon chitons draped over seemingly nude tattooed bodies, representing the ever-present competing allegiances to the will of the gods or to the law of man. Working backwards through the process, this thesis discusses the avant-garde aims of the production and how they were achieved in design. The historical and cultural research, and how it directly influenced the costume design, is discussed for both Seamus Heaney and The Burial at Thebes, as well as for Sophocles and Antigone. Moving through a thorough script analysis and text-to-text comparison of Antigone and The Burial at Thebes illuminates the character and situation traits that are expressed in the design. Script-to-script comparisons reveal the heightened political language Heaney has created to make a story readily accessible to modern audiences. This gives Creon more humanity, thus magnifying the conflict, which is analyzed using conflict theory

This thesis examines Seamus Heaney’s approach to translation with specific reference to Sweeney Astray, The Cure at Troy, and Beowulf. An assessment of Heaney’s translations, and the ways in which they relate to his poetry, is essential to an understanding of his work as a poet. This thesis demonstrates the centrality of translation to Heaney’s oeuvre as an effective means to comment on his Northern Irish socio-political context without producing political propaganda. Translation is a valuable means for Heaney to elucidate his contemporary experience by considering it in terms of the recorded past captured within his chosen translations. Instead of comparing the three translations with their original texts, this thesis concentrates on Heaney’s translations as a continuation of his own creative work and as catalysts for further poetry. The translations are explored in chronological order to allow a sense of Heaney’s development as a translator and his efforts to remain critically attuned to the Northern Irish political situation. The first chapter examines Heaney’s translation of the Gaelic poem Buile Suibhne, which is published as Sweeney Astray. In this first major act of translation Heaney recognises the political role that translation is able to play. He draws attention to the protagonist’s sense of cultural ease in both Britain and Ireland, which he argues is exemplary for the people of Ulster and renders the narrative particularly accessible to a Northern Irish readership due to his anglicisation of the text, which is intended as a reminder to both Catholics and Protestants of their shared identity as Irishmen. The second chapter focuses on Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, entitled The Cure at Troy. Heaney’s translation contextualises the Ancient Greek concern for personal integrity in the face of political necessity, a situation relevant to his own complex relationship with Northern Irish politics. His alterations to the text accentuate the positive aspects of the play, suggesting the very real possibility of social change within the seemingly constant violence of Northern Ireland. The third chapter explores Heaney’s engagement with the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf, as a means of coming to terms with the complex history of Irish colonisation through language. This chapter assesses Heaney’s incorporation of Irish dialectal words into his translation, which lend the poem political weight, and yet prove to be contextually appropriate, rendering Heaney’s Beowulf a masterpiece of readability and subtle political commentary.

Wong, Wai Man. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-98). / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

Seamus Heaney's prose poetics return repeatedly to the adequacy of poetry, its ameliorative, restorative response to the inimical reality of life in the public domain. Drawing on manuscript as well as print sources, this thesis charts the development of this central theme, demonstrating the extent to which it threads throughout the whole of Heaney's thought, from his earliest conceptual formation to his late cultural poetics. Heaney's preoccupation with this idea largely originates in his undergraduate studies where he encounters Leavis and Arnold's accounts of poetry's adequacy: its ameliorative cultural and spiritual function. He also inherits, from Romantic and modernist influences, two differing accounts of poetry's relationship to reality. That conflicted inheritance engenders a crisis within Heaney's own early theorisation of poetry's adequacy to the violence of public life. An important period of clarification ensues, out of which emerge the dualisms of his later thought, and his emphasis on poetry's capacity to encompass, and yet remain separate from, ‘history'. Accompanied by habitual appropriation of Christian doctrine and language, these conceptual structures increasingly assume a redemptive pattern. By the mid-1990s, Heaney's humanist commitment to a ‘totally adequate' poetry has assumed a thoroughly Arnoldian character. The logical strain of his conceptual constructions—particularly the emphasis on poetry's autonomy from history—becomes acutely apparent, revealing just how appropriate the ambivalent ideal ‘adequacy' is. The subsequent expansion of Heaney's poetics into a general affirmation of the arts illuminates the fiduciary character of his trust in poetry while exposing the limits of that trust: Heaney's belief in poetry's adequacy constitutes a humanist substitute for—indeed, an ‘afterimage' of—Christian belief. This, finally, is the deep significance of the idea of adequacy to Heaney's thought: it allows us to identify precisely the Arnoldian origin, the late humanist character, and the limits of his troubled trust in poetry.