Richard J. FinneranRichard J Finneran, who has died aged 61, was a noted scholar of Anglo-Irish literature and editor of many volumes of the works of WB Yeats. A stalwart of the Yeats International Summer School, he last took part in the proceedings at Sligo in 2003.
The school's director, Prof Jonathan Allison, described him as a courageous, innovative and punctilious scholar, who would be remembered by all who valued integrity, honesty and precision in textual studies. "I cannot think of anyone who made such a deep and lasting mark on Yeats studies and Anglo-Irish literature studies in the last 40 years."
Finneran, who held the Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, first made his mark on the study of his chosen area of specialisation in 1974 with his edition of The Letters of James Stephens. This was followed three years later with Anglo-Irish Literature: A Review of Research. Not only was critical interest in the field about to expand exponentially, the application of computers to the assembling of such data would soon replace the card-index file. He at first remained attached to individual authors, such as Stephens, whose work did not attract the heavyweights of the American academy. In 1978, the Dolmen Press published The Olympian and the Leprechaun: WB Yeats and James Stephens.
Soon he became involved in the burgeoning Yeats industry. A two-volume selection of letters addressed to Yeats, which he edited jointly with George Mills Harper and W M Murphy, had appeared in 1977. The need for a new collective edition of Yeats's works in poetry, drama and prose was widely recognised. Less so, a methodology acceptable to the many schools of editorial theory and Yeatsian interpretation.
In 1984, his WB Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, was published under the English imprint of Macmillan, Yeats's old publishers. Though in some respects it worked towards establishing an order for the poems, which significantly located the little piece named Politics right at the end (where Yeats had wished it to be), the New Edition drew some severe criticism. In a development which can only have been deeply hurtful to Richard Finneran, Macmillan commissioned what was effectively a rival new edition complete with appendices explaining the principles adopted. He explained his own position in Editing Yeats's Poems (1983) and Editing Yeats's Poems: a Reconsideration (1990).
Born in New York on December 19th, 1943, he was the son of Edward Finneran and his wife, Maude (née Rudden). He graduated from New York University in 1964, and studied for a doctorate at the University of North Carolina. It was there that he met his mentor, George Mills Harper, who was head of the English department. His PhD completed, in the late 1960s he taught at the University of Florida and New York University. He then took up a position at Tulane University, New Orleans, where he remained for 18 years. In 1988 he was appointed to the University of Tennessee. "Richard was the professional's professional," a colleague said, "knowing how to play the academic game, and willing to teach our students how it's done." He contributed to a wide range of journals, including the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and the Irish Literary Supplement.
He was general editor, with George Mills Harper, of the Collected Works of WB Yeats, series editor of The Cornell Yeats and editorial consultant for the Chadwyck-Healy Electronic Yeats Archive.
In several areas of the Yeats project, his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, whom he married in 1976, ably assisted him. Their edition of The Irish Dramatic Movement appeared in 2003.
He was a leading member of the Society for Textual Scholarship and served in many capacities with the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Accepting the association's Fisher Award for Career Achievement in 2003, he said: "Department politics, petty chairmen, jealous reviewers - none of this is within your control, and none of it matters in the end: your work remains . . . Yeats had said it forcefully many years before: 'Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught. / Something to perfection brought.' " Predeceased by his wife in 2000, he is survived by his son, Richard, and daughter, Catherine.
Richard John Finneran: born December 19th, 1943; died November 17th, 2005