Description: For the first time in a single volume: comprehensive overviews and concise analyses of the key critical texts and approaches to the most-studied works of literature. By assembling a wide-ranging collection of extracts from essays, reviews, and articles, these smart and sophisticated study guides provide students with ready access to the most important secondary writings on one or more texts by a given writer.

Each volume:
-- offers a balanced and nuanced approach to criticism, drawing on a wide array of British and American sources;
-- explains criticism in terms of key approaches, allowing students to grasp the central issues in each work;
-- is edited by a noted scholar who specializes in the writer or work;
-- includes notes and a comprehensive bibliography, and index.

In this collection of critical responses to Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney's poetry, Elmer Andrews presents the debates surrounding the poet's work and popular appeal. The writings gathered here clarify and explore issu of cultural identity and nationality, as well as debates on the power of language and the function of verse. Beginning with Heaney's early collection, Death of a Naturalist, the guide reviews and contextualizes material on successive volumes (including 1996's The Spirit Level), so that students of Heaney's verse will find an accessible pathway through the most important critical writings on this major poet.

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