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 literary influences that led to John McGahern becoming Ireland's greatest fiction writer of the post-war generation.
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 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 Essays on John McGahern written by Derek Hand and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multidisciplinary collection of essays which situates McGahern in his literary context and explains the ingredients that make him such a revered writer, one who had his finger firmly on the pulse of the Irish nation. Violence, love and desire, ecology, memory, friendship, photography, rage, sin, are examined with a view to assessing how they are pertinent to McGahern's work and the extent to which they contribute to his literary legacy
Download or read book Journey Westward written by Frank Shovlin and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey Westward suggests that James Joyce was attracted to the west of Ireland as a place of authenticity and freedom. It examines how this acute sensibility is reflected in Dubliners via a series of coded nods and winks, posing new and revealing questions about one of the most enduring and resonant collections of short stories ever written. The answers are a fusion of history and literary criticism, utilizing close readings that balance the techniques of realism and symbolism. The result is a startlingly original study that opens up fresh ways of thinking about Joyce's masterpieces.
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 Shadowplay written by Joseph O'Connor and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A West End theater in London is shaken up by the crimes of Jack the Ripper in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Star of the Sea. Henry Irving is Victorian London’s most celebrated actor and theater impresario. He has introduced groundbreaking ideas to the theater, bringing to the stage performances that are spectacular, shocking, and always entertaining. When Irving decides to open his own London theater with the goal of making it the greatest playhouse on earth, he hires a young Dublin clerk harboring literary ambitions by the name of Bram Stoker to manage it. As Irving’s theater grows in reputation and financial solvency, he lures to his company of mummers the century’s most beloved actress, the dazzlingly talented leading lady Ellen Terry, who nightly casts a spell not only on her audiences but also on Stoker and Irving both. Bram Stoker’s extraordinary experiences at the Lyceum Theatre, his early morning walks on the streets of a London terrorized by a serial killer, his long, tempestuous relationship with Irving, and the closeness he finds with Ellen Terry, inspire him to write Dracula, the most iconic and best-selling supernatural tale ever published. A magnificent portrait both of lamp-lit London and of lives and loves enacted on the stage, Shadowplay’s rich prose, incomparable storytelling, and vivid characters will linger in readers’ hearts and minds for many years. “A vibrantly imaginative narrative of passion, intrigue and literary ambition set in the garish heyday of a theater. . . . Artfully splicing truth with fantasy, O’Connor has a glorious time turning a ramshackle and haunted London playhouse into a primary source for Stoker’s Gothic imaginings.” —Miranda Seymour, The New York Times Book Review “A gorgeously written historical novel about Stoker’s inner life. . . . I wasn’t prepared to be awed by his prose, which is so good you can taste it. . . . O’Connor dazzles.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “And Mr. O’Connor’s main characters—Stoker, Irving and the beloved actress Ellen Terry—are so forcefully brought to life that when, close to tears, you reach this drama’s final page, you will return to the beginning just to remain in their company.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal “This novel blows the dust off its Victorian trappings and brings them to scintillating life.” —Publishers Weekly, PW Picks, Starred Review FINALIST 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST 2020 DALKEY LITERARY AWARD 2020 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
Download or read book Collected Stories written by John McGahern and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark event: the collected stories of 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Tóibín). 'Wise and compelling ... Elegiac and graceful.' David Mitchell 'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel .' Melvyn Bragg 'Gentle, lyrical, an amorist of language, a natural historian of the soul.' Irish Times 'Exquisite stories . . . Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings . . . Writing of extraordinary beauty.' Guardian
Download or read book That They May Face the Rising Sun written by John McGahern and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be the finest Irish writer now working in prose, John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun vividly brings to life a whole world and its people with insight and humour and deep sympathy. Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. By the novel's close we feel that we have been introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere. 'It is a simple and ordinary story, calmly, wryly crafted with subtle detail - and therein lies McGahern's genius. As sharply, brilliantly observed as any he has written . . . McGahern, a supreme chronicler of the ordinary . . . has created a novel that lives and breathes as convincingly as the characters who inhabit it.' Irish Times
Download or read book The Empress written by S. J. Kincaid and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling sequel to S.J. Kincaid’s New York Times bestselling novel, The Diabolic, which TeenVogue.com called “the perfect kind of high-pressure adventure.” It’s a new day in the Empire. Tyrus has ascended to the throne with Nemesis by his side and now they can find a new way forward—one where they don’t have to hide or scheme or kill. One where creatures like Nemesis will be given worth and recognition, where science and information can be shared with everyone and not just the elite. But having power isn’t the same thing as keeping it, and change isn’t always welcome. The ruling class, the Grandiloquy, has held control over planets and systems for centuries—and they are plotting to stop this teenage Emperor and Nemesis, who is considered nothing more than a creature and certainly not worthy of being Empress. Nemesis will protect Tyrus at any cost. He is the love of her life, and they are partners in this new beginning. But she cannot protect him by being the killing machine she once was. She will have to prove the humanity that she’s found inside herself to the whole Empire—or she and Tyrus may lose more than just the throne. But if proving her humanity means that she and Tyrus must do inhuman things, is the fight worth the cost of winning it?
Download or read book The Dark written by John McGahern and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dark, John McGahern's second novel, is set in rural Ireland. The themes - that McGahern has made his own - are adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both a puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father. Against a background evoked with quiet, undemonstrative mastery, McGahern explores with precision and tenderness a human situation, superficially very ordinary, but inwardly an agony of longing and despair. 'It creates a small world indelibly and without recourse to deliberate heightening effects of prose. There are few writers whose work can be anticipated with such confidence and excitement.' Sunday Times 'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel, New Statesman
Download or read book Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature written by Jacob L. Bender and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters—where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds—the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.
Download or read book The Politics of Consumption written by Alan Bradshaw and published by Mayflybooks/Ephemera. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This age of austerity comes on the back of a lengthened period of apparently rampant consumer excess: that was a party for which we are all now having to pay. A spectacular period of unsustainably funded over-indulgence, it seems, has now given rise to a sobering period of barely fundable mere-subsistence. Consumption, narrated along such lines, is a sin which has to be paid for. Beyond the deceptive theology of consumption, however, lies actual politics. In May 2012, we hosted a conference at Dublin's Royal Society of the Antiquaries of Ireland in order to analyse and debate the politics of consumption. This special issue is the outcome of the discussions which took place during that event. It features conceptual and empirical investigations into the politics of consumption, a head-to-head debate on the idea of consumer citizenship, a series of notes on the relationship between art, politics, and consumption, and reviews of two recent books. Taken together, these diverse pieces underline the need for a politically-oriented analysis of consumption, not only for the sake of informing academic debates but also for the sake of informing contemporary consumption practices. Consumption, we argue, is political: to approach it otherwise is to dogmatically seek refuge in a world of fantasy. Issue editors: Alan Bradshaw, Norah Campbell and Stephen Dunne. Contributors: Ben Fine, Kate Soper, Peter Armstrong, Matthias Zick Varul, Eleftheria Lekakis, Isleide Fontenelle, Adam Arvidsson, Detlev Zwick, Olga Kravets, Stevphen Shukaitis, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Femke Kaulingfreks, Ruud Kaulingfreks, Andreas Chatzidakis, Georgios Patsiaouras, Gavin Brown and Angus Cameron.
Download or read book Mahmoud Darwish Exile s Poet written by Hala Khamis Nassar and published by Interlink Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahmoud Darwish's work has long been considered seminal in shaping modern Arabic poetry. This volume examines the complex connections between poetry, myth, lyric, prose and history in his work, while a number of articles situate his verse in both global and Arabic contexts.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature written by Nicholas Taylor-Collins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that Shakespeare continues to influence contemporary Irish literature, through postcolonial, dramaturgical, epistemological and narratological means. International critics examine a range of contemporary writers including Eavan Boland, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Frank McGuinness, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, and explore Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories and comedies, as well as his sonnets. Together, the chapters demonstrate that Shakespeare continues to exert a pressure on Irish writing into the twenty-first century, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the fact that his writing is inextricably tied to the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonization of Ireland. Contemporary Irish writers appropriate, adopt, adapt and strategize through their engagements with Shakespeare, and indeed through his own engagement with the world around him four hundred years ago.
Download or read book The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel written by Charles J. Shields and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Stoner was published in 1965, the novel sold only a couple of thousand copies before disappearing with hardly a trace. Yet John Williams’s quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner “a perfect novel,” and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it “a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man.” The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel traces the life of Stoner’s author, John Williams. Acclaimed biographer Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams’s life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in the halls of academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams’s development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after Dutch publisher Lebowski brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and has sold over a million copies.
Download or read book Visions of Alterity written by Elke D'hoker and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville's novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville's fiction. In close textual analyses of Banville's most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville's solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
