Download or read book John McGahern and Modernism written by Richard Robinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McGahern's work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with 'making it old' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern's statements about the 'presence' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGahern's six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGahern's fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGahern's fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as 'low' modernism, the complexity of McGahern's time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGahern's narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.
Download or read book The Distance of Irish Modernism written by John Greaney and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Distance of Irish Modernism interrogates the paradox through which Irish modernist fictions have become containers for national and transnational histories while such texts are often oblique and perverse in terms of their times and geographies. John Greaney explores this paradox to launch a metacritical study of the modes of inquiry used to define Irish modernism in the 21st century. Focused on works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Flann O'Brien and Kate O'Brien, this book analyses how and if the complex representational strategies of modernist fictions provide a window on historical events and realities. Greaney deploys close reading, formal analysis, narratology and philosophical accounts of literature alongside historicist and materialist approaches, as well as postcolonial and world literature paradigms, to examine how modernist texts engage the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Emphasizing the proximities and the distances between modernist aesthetic practice and the history of modernity in Ireland and beyond, this book enables a new model for narrating Irish modernism.
Download or read book John McGahern written by Željka Doljanin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique collection brings together essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, education, journalism, creative writing and literary criticism, to offer new insights into the writer, his work and his legacy. Featuring a range of distinguished contributors, including Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished McGahern interview, the collection enhances the existing body of criticism, extending the McGahern conversation into new areas and deepening appreciation of the considerable achievements of this great writer. The volume, which also features an original poem by Paula Meehan written in honour of McGahern, will stimulate the interest of students, researchers and general readers of Irish literature and culture.
Download or read book The Distance of Irish Modernism written by John Greaney and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Distance of Irish Modernism interrogates the paradox through which Irish modernist fictions have become containers for national and transnational histories while such texts are often oblique and perverse in terms of their times and geographies. John Greaney explores this paradox to launch a metacritical study of the modes of inquiry used to define Irish modernism in the 21st century. Focused on works by Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, Flann O'Brien and Kate O'Brien, this book analyses how and if the complex representational strategies of modernist fictions provide a window on historical events and realities. Greaney deploys close reading, formal analysis, narratology and philosophical accounts of literature alongside historicist and materialist approaches, as well as postcolonial and world literature paradigms, to examine how modernist texts engage the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Emphasizing the proximities and the distances between modernist aesthetic practice and the history of modernity in Ireland and beyond, this book enables a new model for narrating Irish modernism.
Download or read book Touchstones written by Frank Shovlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through his reading. This reading, it is shown, was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. As such, new insights are provided into McGahern's admiration and use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, James Joyce, Albert Camus and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern's published texts as well as unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of the book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.
Download or read book Distance of Irish Modernism written by John Greaney and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rethinking the relationship between form and history in Irish modernist writing and its aftermath, this book examines how critics have previously categorized the Irish modernist novel, as an evidentiary form of cultural memory. John Greaney exposes the problems with such a stance, exploring this paradox by analysing novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien and John McGahern through new critical paradigms in modernist studies. This approach contrasts the untranslatable gap between modernist literature and national history (world literature, translation studies) with materialist approaches to modernism (affect theory, new materialism), and in so doing delineates how Irish modernism becomes both a world problematic as well as a container for national history. As such, The Distance of Irish Modernism demonstrates that modernist fictions, and fictions influenced by the legacies of modernism, are engaged with but different to the cultural memories they supposedly transmit. Constituting new methodologies for understanding how stories are told and memories are formulated in and after Irish modernist writing, this book re-conceptualizes the parameters of Irish modernism."--
Download or read book Laying Out the Bones written by Bridget English and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland’s cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory—such as readers’ competing desires for a story and for closure—with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.
Download or read book Modernism in Irish Women s Contemporary Writing written by Paige Reynolds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.
Download or read book Sacred Weather written by Niamh Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there such a thing as essential Irishness, something which can be experienced, invested in, and politically weaponised? Sacred Weather proposes to take this idea seriously, or literally, by proposing an objective correlative to 'Irishness' in certain atmospheric effects - or Stimmung - as these are depicted in literature, art, and film. By filtering the concept of pure pleasure, through recent writings on Marxist and affect theory by Antonio Negri, as well as the eco-critical writings of Timothy Morton, this work develops atmospheric essentialism as a theoretical template through which Irish Studies might radically, creatively, and imaginatively reconsider the idea of Irishness as an experience in itself. It does this by applying and expanding upon the operations of atmospheric essentialism in the work of the Irish novelist and short-story writer John McGahern and, in this way, proposing an equally radical intervention in current considerations of, and consensus on, the work of this writer. The readings are original, risky, and intended to start conversation.
Download or read book The Leavetaking written by John McGahern and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín). A day, crucial and cathartic, in the life of a young Catholic schoolteacher who has returned to Ireland after a year's sabbatical in London where he married an American divorcee. As a result he now faces certain dismissal by the school authorities. Moving from the earliest memories of both the man and the woman, the novel recreates their breaking of the shackles of guilt and duty into the acceptance of a fulfilling adult love. 'A beautiful, irresistible work of imagination. Sunday Telegraph 'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel .' Melvyn Bragg
Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by Joe Cleary and published by Field Day Publications. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it has managed to do since it began to ‘modernize’ and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world? These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, and comments too on what he terms the ‘neo-naturalism’ of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction written by Liam Harte and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 698 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction that provide authoritative assessments of the breadth and achievement of Irish novelists and short story writers.
Download or read book John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition written by Stanley Van der Ziel and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues how John McGahern was not only an acute social commentator but also an intelligent and perceptive reader interested in the nature and function of literature. It presents McGahern as a highly literary writer aware of the various literary traditions he had inherited, and shows how his imagination was shaped by his lifelong immersion in Irish, English and European literature. Stanley van der Ziel examines how McGahern's reading of classic books and authors determined the concerns of his novels and stories by placing some key elements of McGahern's aesthetic in their appropriate literary contexts.--
Download or read book The Pornographer written by John McGahern and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative novel by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín). Michael, a writer of pornographic fiction, creates an ideal world of sex through his two stock athletes, Colonel Grimshaw and Mavis Carmichael, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in hospital tolerable, while his employer, Maloney, failed poet and comic king of pornographers, comes gradually to preside over this broken world. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites, but, above all, sex and death are never far from each other. 'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel .' Melvyn Bragg 'A marvellous novel, deep, moving, rich and resonant, about love, lust, life and death.' Sunday Express 'A novel that succeeds beautifully in doing what it sets out to do; to record and illuminate varieties of disenchantment.' Times Literary Supplement 'An admirable book, one of the finest I have read for a long time ... I cannot recommend Mr McGahern too strongly.' Sunday Telegraph
Download or read book Amongst Women written by John McGahern and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Moran is an old Irish Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence. Moran is till fighting—with his family, his friends, and even himself—in this haunting testimony to the enduring qualities of the human spirit.
Download or read book Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture written by Paige Reynolds and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture explores manifestations of the themes, forms and practices of high modernism in Irish literature and culture produced subsequent to this influential movement. The interdisciplinary collection reveals how Irish artists grapple with modernist legacies and forge new modes of expression for modern and contemporary culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction written by Liam Harte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Seán O'Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.
