Barry Sheils
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594022 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barry Sheils |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barry |
| FAMILY NAME | Sheils |
| SIGNATURE | SHEILS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Clickbait modernism
Over recent years terms such as autofiction, postcritique and postfiction have been repurposed to designate a moment in the history of the novel, and in culture more broadly, to do with the distribution of narrative authority. These terms have also helped articulate a contemporary double bind whereby impatience with the knowingness of third-person narration meets an equal and opposite impatience with ideology critique, whose unmasking of textual …
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly rel…
Style interminable
Style emerged into discursive prominence in nineteenth century Europe at the same time as the classical symptoms of hysteria were given new impetus by neurologists and psychoanalysts. Later, when the Post-War architecture of late capitalism seemed to spell the end of style, ‘in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the individual brushstroke’ (Fredric Jameson), hysteria started to disappear as a psychiatric diagnosis. To explore ho…
The contemporary problem of style
This essay sets the parameters of this special issue on the contemporary problem of style. Noting that the critical term style has returned to discursive prominence in recent years, the introduction explores the peculiarity of its status in literary studies. Asking how style underlies our critical practice today, we track the partially conflicting genealogies of style and the variety of its disciplinary relations. We explore the problem of style …
W.B. Yeats and World Literature
Arguing for a reconsideration of William Butler Yeats’s work in the light of contemporary studies of world literature, Barry Sheils shows how reading Yeats enables a fuller understanding of the relationship between the extensive map of world literary production and the intensities of poetic practice. Yeats’s appropriation of Japanese Noh theatre, his promotion of translations of Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Purohit Swãmi, and his repeated venture…
The violation of style
This article explores the meaningfulness of ‘style’ as a critical concept in contemporary English literary studies. Despite appearing to have fallen out of fashion with the rise of theory in the 1970s, style remains closely linked to canons of historical thought. The article reflects upon how the vicissitudes of English literary style emerge from the historical conditions of upper class Englishness, particularly its ridiculing of Enlightenment ab…
Poetry in the Modern State
In this article I propose to connect Yeats’s “new fanaticism” and his “late style”—a term I have borrowed from Edward Said to describe the preposterous self-consciousness of the poet’s old age. There are two major aspects to my argument: first, that Yeats’s repeated use of violence as a poetic device, especially when he was an old man—inter-generational murder, hunger strike, political protest, or severe cultural critique—was not simply the catha…
Dark cognition’
In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Got…
No prominent works on this page.
Dark cognition’
In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Got…
Poetry in the Modern State
In this article I propose to connect Yeats’s “new fanaticism” and his “late style”—a term I have borrowed from Edward Said to describe the preposterous self-consciousness of the poet’s old age. There are two major aspects to my argument: first, that Yeats’s repeated use of violence as a poetic device, especially when he was an old man—inter-generational murder, hunger strike, political protest, or severe cultural critique—was not simply the catha…
W.B. Yeats and World Literature
Arguing for a reconsideration of William Butler Yeats’s work in the light of contemporary studies of world literature, Barry Sheils shows how reading Yeats enables a fuller understanding of the relationship between the extensive map of world literary production and the intensities of poetic practice. Yeats’s appropriation of Japanese Noh theatre, his promotion of translations of Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Purohit Swãmi, and his repeated venture…
The violation of style
This article explores the meaningfulness of ‘style’ as a critical concept in contemporary English literary studies. Despite appearing to have fallen out of fashion with the rise of theory in the 1970s, style remains closely linked to canons of historical thought. The article reflects upon how the vicissitudes of English literary style emerge from the historical conditions of upper class Englishness, particularly its ridiculing of Enlightenment ab…
Style interminable
Style emerged into discursive prominence in nineteenth century Europe at the same time as the classical symptoms of hysteria were given new impetus by neurologists and psychoanalysts. Later, when the Post-War architecture of late capitalism seemed to spell the end of style, ‘in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the individual brushstroke’ (Fredric Jameson), hysteria started to disappear as a psychiatric diagnosis. To explore ho…
The contemporary problem of style
This essay sets the parameters of this special issue on the contemporary problem of style. Noting that the critical term style has returned to discursive prominence in recent years, the introduction explores the peculiarity of its status in literary studies. Asking how style underlies our critical practice today, we track the partially conflicting genealogies of style and the variety of its disciplinary relations. We explore the problem of style …
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture
Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumption habits of a culture utterly rel…
Clickbait modernism
Over recent years terms such as autofiction, postcritique and postfiction have been repurposed to designate a moment in the history of the novel, and in culture more broadly, to do with the distribution of narrative authority. These terms have also helped articulate a contemporary double bind whereby impatience with the knowingness of third-person narration meets an equal and opposite impatience with ideology critique, whose unmasking of textual …
Art (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · History (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Irish and British Studies (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works) · Politics (3 works)