Ferocious Humanism

W.J. Mc Cormack is Professor of Literary History in the University of Londonand head of the English Department, Goldsmiths' College. He has published a biography of Sheridan Le Fanu (1980) and a radical interrogation of the Protestant Ascendancy (From Burke to Beckett, 1994). He is currently completing a biography of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). W.J. McCormack also writes poetry under the name of Hugh Maxton. His first book ofverse, The Noise of the Fields, was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 1976. The