In James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Seamus Heaney’s late twentieth century selected poems the treatment of personal loss simultaneously reveals similarities and reinforce the texts’ distinctive qualities addressing the question. Within both texts’ treatment of personal loss, each explicate critical and perceptive (context) insights regarding their respective social milieus (context) which expound visceral revelations relating to societal constructs and existentialism (context) elaboration/detail. While Dubliners tends to explore the harsh reality of urban modernity at the turn of the century (context), Heaney investigates Irish identity in the wake of an uncertain social and political landscape (context) synopsis of text. Ultimately both
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Eveline’s identity is fragmented between a harsh domestic life rooted in the past and the possibility of a new married life abroad. From the beginning, the anaphora of ‘she sat by the window… she continued to sit at the window’, expounds Eveline’s stagnation and personal loss of identity. Joyce, through Eveline’s characterisation, explicates Ireland’s paralysing psychosis resulting from a struggle in finding its own distinct identity and sense of nationalism after centuries of British imperialism. Eveline’s personal loss with her mother’s death causes her to ignore her ‘right to happiness’ in order to ‘fulfil the promise to her mother’. Eveline’s identity crisis generates a temporal paralysis as hyperbolically ‘all of the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’. Thus, while Heaney offers a more postmodern investigation of identity as an external construct that allows him to resolve his sense of personal loss of heritage, Joyce focuses on the ‘moral history’ of Ireland struggling to assert itself in a pre-WWI zeitgeist and thus his treatment of Eveline’s inability to reconcile the loss of tradition is exemplary of Dublin’s paralysis in the early twentieth century.
Thus, Joyce and Heaney’s treatment of personal loss in terms of losing one’s innocence and sense of familial tradition simultaneously reveal similarities and reinforce the texts’ distinctive qualities in highlighting contextual
Eveline’s identity is fragmented between a harsh domestic life rooted in the past and the possibility of a new married life abroad. From the beginning, the anaphora of ‘she sat by the window… she continued to sit at the window’, expounds Eveline’s stagnation and personal loss of identity. Joyce, through Eveline’s characterisation, explicates Ireland’s paralysing psychosis resulting from a struggle in finding its own distinct identity and sense of nationalism after centuries of British imperialism. Eveline’s personal loss with her mother’s death causes her to ignore her ‘right to happiness’ in order to ‘fulfil the promise to her mother’. Eveline’s identity crisis generates a temporal paralysis as hyperbolically ‘all of the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’. Thus, while Heaney offers a more postmodern investigation of identity as an external construct that allows him to resolve his sense of personal loss of heritage, Joyce focuses on the ‘moral history’ of Ireland struggling to assert itself in a pre-WWI zeitgeist and thus his treatment of Eveline’s inability to reconcile the loss of tradition is exemplary of Dublin’s paralysis in the early twentieth century.
Thus, Joyce and Heaney’s treatment of personal loss in terms of losing one’s innocence and sense of familial tradition simultaneously reveal similarities and reinforce the texts’ distinctive qualities in highlighting contextual