Sean Sheehan
Articles by Sean Sheehan
2023
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Biography
A Life of Journeys
2022
2021
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Reading Empson
William Empson’s reputation as a severely intellectual critic can be offputting for anyone coming to him for the first time, but it’s a misleading view.…
2020
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World Art / Culture
Takes All Kinds
Herodotus was intensely interested in all forms of oddity or unfamiliarity, whether relating to human behaviour or geographical curiosity. Everything is a fish that comes…
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World Art / Culture
Roads Both Taken
Novelist William Gibson likes to throw you into the narrative and semiotic deep end of two worlds in which history has bifurcated. Learning to navigate…
2019
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World History
Tarantulas and Dynamite
Nietzsche’s reputation was tarnished for a long time by his posthumous adoption by Hitler. In fact the philosopher was repelled by antisemitism. It is now…
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World Art / Culture
Alarms and Excursions
John Ruskin may be little known today, but his warnings about the effects of industrial pollution in the Victorian age still read well, while his…
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World Literature
Betrayal as an Act of Faith
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s rejection of Anglicanism to seek truth in the teachings of the Roman church shared many features with another ‘betrayal’ which happened seventy…
2018
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World Art / Culture
No Easy Answers
Wittgenstein’s talks in Cambridge in the 1930s were creative acts, works of art one might say, that came into existence in the process of their…
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Gentrifying Hegel
It is quite astonishing that there is no reference to Slavoj Žižek in a massive new volume which calls itself a handbook to Hegel. While…
2017
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World Literature
Reading the Revolution
A plethora of new books has appeared this year, accompanied by a number of exhibitions, in response to the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the…
2015
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World Literature
Wrong Train, Right Station
William Blake placed Dante alongside the prophets of the Old Testament, Homer and Shakespeare as an embodiment of poetic genius and he worked studiously on…
2014
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World Art / Culture
Worlds in Words
Scholarly research into ‘dead’ languages evolved over many centuries into an intellectual discipline which was to become the backbone of universities' humanities departments. The history…
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Irish Literature
But I Live in Dublin
The Dublin Notebook, appearing as the seventh volume in OUP’s collected Hopkins, is an exemplary work of scholarship and from now any serious piece of…
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World Literature
Joy for the Disillusioned
At a time when the Bible’s importance is no longer at the centre of secular cultures, it is timely to consider the contribution of the…
2013
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World Art / Culture
Ulysses and Africa
A new book seeks to consider writers' responses to Homer from an anticolonial or postcolonialist perspective.
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World Art / Culture
The Curator of Chiaroscuro
Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it…
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World Literature
Hopkins’s Wound
Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely…
Blog Posts by Sean Sheehan
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Mapping the Civil War
March 4, 2025