Tutor information
Michael Parker
Michael Parker works for Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education, and is a Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He has published six books to date on poetry, fiction and drama from the Republic and Northern Ireland, and their historical contexts, but has written also on British Literature, Eastern European and Postcolonial Writing. He is currently completing Seamus Heaney: Legacies, Afterlives, a critical study of the poet's complete oeuvre.
Courses
Irish fiction has acquired a high international profile since the 1990s, by reflecting the major transformations that reshaped the culture. This course examines four novels that illuminate the present by re-reading the past on both sides of the border.
The course will focus on Heaney’s highly accessible collection, Seeing Things (1991), written during his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry. As his lectures reflect his responses to diverse range of poets, we will also look at samples of their poetry.