Dr. Rosie Lavan
Associate Professor, English

Projects

• Title
  • The Extension of Literature
• Summary
  • I have already identified the subject of my third monograph project, which in methodology and intellectual ambition is a natural successor to my work to date. Provisionally titled 'The Extension of Literature', this project will examine the role of key individuals working in publishing, the literary press, and national broadcasters, in the promotion and reception of literature, particularly poetry, in mainstream culture in Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century. In planning this project, I have identified a number of people I would like to research. For example, I have a longstanding interest in Hilda Matheson, who was the first Talks Director at the BBC in the 1920s; in her work at the broadcaster and subsequently directing publishing initiatives at the Ministry of Information during the Second World War she consistently commissioned writers to undertake projects which were not exclusively or necessarily 'literary' and yet which had the combined effects of disseminating and recontextualising their writing in new circumstances; I have already explored material relating to Matheson at the BBC Written Archives at Caversham. I am very interested, too, in the ways in which Radio Éireann and subsequently RTÉ explored and established relationships with writers and sought to embed literature in the broadcasting schedule in Ireland. In this regard the contribution of Roibeard Ó Faracháin, who was appointed first Talks Officer at Radio Éireann in 1939, is vital, and the Broadcast and Document Archives at RTÉ have extensive holdings of his work. Both Ó Faracháin and Matheson, engaged by their national broadcasters, are implicitly also involved in the national conditioning of the writing they featured - under distinct pressures in Dublin and London, and yet at the same time addressing, and raising, comparable questions through the new kind of work they were doing with literature. Another important comparison could be explored between Karl Miller and John Jordan. In my work on Heaney I became very interested in Miller's role as literary editor of the New Statesman, editor of the Listener, and founding editor of the London Review of Books. It is unquestionably true that without Miller's advocacy Seamus Heaney's career would have begun, and may indeed have developed, very differently. In Ireland, John Jordan's work and role is ripe for academic consideration: like Miller he had an academic career alongside his work as a critic, broadcaster, and founding editor of Poetry Ireland. His papers are held in the National Library of Ireland. I propose to launch my research with these figures, but there are of course others whose careers would complement and extend the issues I am keen to explore here: questions to do with the national conditions and conditioning of literature; the professionalisation of both literary and scholarly writing in the twentieth century; and the role of institutions in establishing, promoting and sustaining the careers of writers. My goal with this project would be to prepare an application for a major grant funding: the work depends on ambitious archival research, and its parameters would be expanded by the assembly of a team of researchers. I look forward to discussing this with colleagues in the Research Office.
• Funding Agency
  • TBC
• Date To
  • 2025

• Title
  • The Poems of Seamus Heaney
• Summary
  • I was contracted by Faber & Faber to join this project as an assistant to the editor, Bernard O'Donoghue, in 2017, and in summer 2020 I was appointed co-editor. My varied work is central to the editorial process. The volume will include all of Heaney's published poems - collected and uncollected - and my primary task has been to assemble and transcribe the uncollected poems. At present, I am preparing the copy-text of the volume, and drafting the accompanying textual annotations, recording all variants. Working closely with Matthew Hollis, Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber, and with the Heaney Estate, we are also reviewing unpublished material held in the Seamus Heaney Literary Papers at the National Library of Ireland, and in the Heaney collection at the Rose Library in Emory University. I am conducting research for the volume in both archives. The primary output of this project will of course be the volume itself: we are working towards submission at the end of 2021 and publication in 2022. I have a real facility for editorial work and I hope that this will be the first of successive editorial projects I take on. Moreover, this research is revealing potential new directions in my longstanding engagement with Heaney's poetry which I plan to develop. One major insight of my work at Emory in October 2019 was the extent and candour of Heaney's correspondence with Dennis O'Driscoll, friend, fellow poet, and arranger of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (2008). Heaney's supreme trust in O'Driscoll is manifest in Stepping Stones alone, but my research in the O'Driscoll papers at Emory indicates that O'Driscoll occupied a uniquely privileged role as reader, counsellor, and critic for Heaney.
• Funding Agency
  • Faber & Faber
• Date From
  • 2017
• Date To
  • 2022

• Title
  • Watching Ourselves at a Distance: Literature, Ireland, and the Changing State, 1948-1998
• Summary
  • This project examines how writers have represented and negotiated the agents, forces, and effects of the collective experience of life in the modern state, in both the Republic and Northern Ireland, between the 1950s and the 1990s. Surveying the period which encompasses Ireland's full emergence as a Republic in 1949, the economic and cultural privations of the 1950s, the modernising drive of the 1960s, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the progress of the women's movement, it is concerned with the composition of collective identities on the island, as they are variously claimed, challenged, or rejected by individual writers. Generational experience and the variant uses of retrospect and the recent past, in both official discourse and literary and cultural production, are central to my analysis. My core research interest in modern Irish poetry provides the motivation for this examination, and the poets Padraic Fallon, John Montague, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney, and the influential publisher of modern Irish poetry, Liam Miller, are major figures in the discussion. Prompted by their engagement with these issues, I expand the argument to include writers and cultural figures whose work is similarly preoccupied with the dynamic between the personal and the collective in the context of the changing, modernising, and variously hampered states in this period. This work grew from extensive research on literary representations of the city of Derry in Northern Ireland which exhibit central issues in the representation of memory and collective experience which ramify elsewhere in modern Irish literature. In my Derry work, I found this to be especially true in poetry and life-writing. Two very different figures, Seamus Heaney and Nell McCafferty, exemplify these tendencies and their work is central to this research. Through Derry, I have been preoccupied with the radically altered and altering political circumstances in the North over the past fifty years and their impact on literature and culture. The broader concerns the project has assumed continue to prioritise the long legacy of partition as a central question for those writers coming to cultural and social consciousness, and seeking and claiming literary expression, in the states which were constituted, on the map and in the mind, after the turbulence of the 1910s and 1920s. How do these writers - in most cases the children and grandchildren of the first citizens of the Free State and Northern Ireland - identify themselves in, and in relation to, the states of their birth? How do they assess the push and pull of history and modernity? How do they relate to Ireland, or to Northern Ireland, and to the assumptions those states and states of mind embody? And what motivates their choice of form and genre in giving expression to their responses to these matters? To date my work has been supported by awards from the Moore Institute in NUI Galway, the Rose Library at Emory University, Atlanta, and the ZSR Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. The main output of this project will be a monograph: I am currently in correspondence with my editor at OUP about publication. I hope to have a complete draft in hand by the end of 2020.
• Funding Agency
  • Various

• Title
  • Seamus Heaney and Society, 1964-1994
• Summary
  • This project resituates Seamus Heaney's work in its varied textual, cultural, institutional, and political contexts, in order to revive the web of connections within which Heaney's work was written, published, and received. It considers: the London publishing scene on which his work emerged; his relationship to Belfast mediated through television documentary; his radio work for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service; his relationship to Derry mediated through photography; and ideas of audience, address, and redress in his Oxford lectures. It makes extensive use of archival material held in the National Library of Ireland, the BBC Northern Ireland Community Archive, and the archive of the British Film Institute, and an interview conducted with Heaney in 2013.
• Funding Agency
  • Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Date From
  • October 2011
• Date To
  • September 2014