Samuel Ferguson, the Literary Achievement

An awareness of the work of Samuel Ferguson is essential to any understanding of the emergence of modern Irish writing. During a career which spanned more than fifty years of the nineteenth century, he was the initiator of several new literary possibili-ties for a community which was beginning to identify itself and to seek a distinctive voice. Although he achieved only limited recogni-tion as a poet in his own lifetime, later Irish writers have acknowledged him as being of central literary significance in the perception of the past and the production of the present. Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement is the first full-length study to trace the range and development of his poetry, translations and fiction, and the changing contexts within which they were written, from the earliest published pieces of the 1830s to the last poems in the 1880s. By offering a comprehensive survey of these writings, Dr Denman evaluates a corpus of work which is at the heart of Irish Victorianism and which underpins much Irish writing during the century since Ferguson's death.