Seamus Deane combined academic rigour with an expressive style that was characterised by both passion and commitment. Without losing any scholarly precision or acuity, he succeeded in engaging broader audiences in some of the key debates of his time. These included: the role of culture in creating political structures and conflict; the responsibility of artists, particularly writers, to articulate alternatives; and the need to think beyond Northern Ireland's political stalemate and imagine a New Ireland. This essential book brings together for the first time Deane's early writings and demonstrates his continuing relevance. It shows his mastery of Irish literature and the striking originality of his readings of canonical texts as well as of contemporary writers. It will delight all those already familiar with Deane's unique voice, while also engaging a fresh generation of readers who will encounter here one of the great literary stylists of the island of Ireland.

‘These essays show a brilliant mind at work – incisive, acerbic, passionately engaged and combative. Seamus Deane makes distinctions as much as connections, working with irony and paradox as much as clear and chiselled statement, offering serious and original thinking about text and context, literature created in a time of crisis.’

Colm Tóibín

‘Seamus Deane combined a fierce and driven intellect, a deep political passion and formidable erudition with the imaginative and linguistic resources of a poet and novelist. These early articles and essays fizz with ideas and crackle with a sometimes explosive energy. Brought together here they form an enduring legacy of one brilliant mind's restless and penetrating engagement with a strange place and troubled times.’

Fintan O'Toole - author and columnist

‘‘Mad Ireland,’ Auden said, hurt W.B. Yeats into poetry and the ‘mad’ Six Counties may have stung Seamus Deane into literary criticism of singular vision, versatility, and verve. In Early Deane, we can see him flex the edgily articulate intellect that would make him admired and feared, risky and revered.’

Joe Cleary - John M. Schiff Professor of English, Yale University

‘History will judge Seamus Deane to be the most vital, stylish, outward-looking and substantial Irish thinker since Burke. This revelatory collection of scattered early writings takes us to the roots of his life's work. Autobiographical pieces about Derry shed light on his critical insights into such classic authors as Goldsmith, Synge and Friel. Mordant, deft, enjoyable.’

John Kerrigan - University of Cambridge

‘This superb collection reveals Deane in the making: bold, combative, and intellectually restless. Bringing together his early, often inaccessible essays, it traces the emergence of a critical imagination that would decisively reshape Irish literary and cultural studies.’

Ronan McDonald - Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies, The University of Melbourne

‘Seamus Deane was Ireland’s foremost cultural intellectual when he died. His astonishing eloquence in person was fully matched in his writing as is fully demonstrated in this marvellous gathering of his early essays, including his indictment of the spectacular maltreatment of the city in which he was reared. A posthumous feast for the mind.’

Brendan O’Leary - Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

‘A treasury of essays displaying the extraordinary range of Deane’s contributions to cultural debates in Ireland and beyond. Here a searing intellect and unnerving wit range over important topics from the European Enlightenment and the Anglo-Irish literary revolution through to Northern Irish politics. The book does sterling service to the pioneering work of the Irish Renaissance intellectual from Derry — Seamus Deane.’

Richard Kearney - Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy, Boston College

‘Seamus Deane’s writing revolutionized the study not just of Irish literature but of colonialism and its aftermath across the globe. By reassembling his early work, much of it prior to the digital age, Early Deane completes our understanding of his evolution as a fearless thinker and dazzling stylist.’

Maud Ellmann - Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Chicago

‘It is a thrill and a provocation to encounter the early Seamus Deane in these pages: his brilliant, biting words ring out across the decades while the demands that he makes of literature and literary criticism inspire and endure.’

Claire Connolly - Professor of Modern English, University College Cork