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Denis Donoghue, the scholar and literary critic, has died at the age of 92. He published more than 30 books and held professorships at New York University and his alma mater, University College Dublin.
His daughter Emma, the acclaimed novelist, posted news of his death on Twitter overnight.
Born in his mother’s home town of Tullow, Co Carlow, in 1928, he grew up in Warrenpoint, Co Down, where his father, from near Killarney in Co Kerry, was a sergeant with the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Upon finishing school he hoped to study for the bar, but he soon realised that he lacked the contacts and means required to succeed at law. Instead he read English and Latin at UCD, completing his BA in 1948. He continued at UCD, completing an MA in 1952 and his PhD in 1958. He later took a further MA at Cambridge University.
He was appointed to the Henry James chair of English and American letters at NYU in 1980; before that he had been UCD’s first professor of modern English and American literature. He became heavily involved in New York intellectual life, serving as codirector of the city’s Poetics Institute and becoming a fellow of New York Institute for the Humanities.
Among Donoghue’s published works were important studies of Jonathan Swift and WB Yeats. His interpretation of the latter has proved influential. He played down the identification of Yeats as a symbolist poet and drew attention to the influence of Nietzsche on his thought.
He argued strongly against revisionist historical interpretations of Yeats, as well as the trend of reading Irish literature through the lens of postcolonial theory. He was much concerned by modern criticism’s tendency to “sacrifice literary understanding on the altar of politics”.
Donoghue was awarded an honorary D Litt by UCD in 1989. In 2013 he received the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ award for humanistic studies. He was a fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, the British Academy and, in the United States, the National Humanities Center.