Tom Paulin's Poetry: Politics, History and Language

This book examines contemporary Northern Irish Literature written in English with the help of the theoretical approach of Irish Studies. It aims to introduce and make a critique of poetry written by Tom Paulin, a contemporary British poet who is regarded one of the major Protestant Irish writers to emerge from Ulster province. The thread pursued in this analysis relates to an investigation of how ideological discourses and the issues of identity are represented in the poet¿s work. The author¿s critical evaluation of existing ideologies and identities and his attempt to respond to them will also be analyzed. To perform this analysis, this work is divided into three chapters. The first chapter presents an account of historical events in Ireland from its conquest to the present focusing in Northern Ireland after partition by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922. The second chapter is dedicated to a reflection on the establishment of Irish national literature written in English and its close relation to Irish social and political history. Finally, the third chapter is dedicated to a detailed analysis of selected poems from five different collections.