John McGahern and the Art of Memory

John McGahern and the Art of Memory

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  • Author: Dermot McCarthy
  • Publisher: Peter Lang
  • ISBN: 9783034301008
  • Category : Ireland
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 352

In 2005, when John McGahern published his Memoir, he revealed for the first time in explicit detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction, a dimension he had hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory, confession, and imaginative recovery, this book is a close reading of McGahern's novels that discovers his narrative poiēsis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single, continuous, and coherent mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern's total body of work centres around the experiences of loss, memory, and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he gradually, painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun.


The Distance of Irish Modernism

The Distance of Irish Modernism

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  • Author: John Greaney
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 135012527X
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 248

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.


John McGahern

John McGahern

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  • Author: John Singleton
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 1000996751
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 223

John McGahern (1934–2006) believed that fiction could act as a window on the world. Such windows, however, frame our fields of vision, alter and shape our perspectives. Far from being static, the artist’s perspective must continually evolve. This book provides a literary analysis of John McGahern’s artistic and poetic vision – his ‘ways of looking’, examining the shifting focus of this vision: how and why it develops, what effects such developments have on the work’s forms and how these forms evolve, at what times and in response to what stimuli. This volume demonstrates that such developments mirror an analogous social expansion during the latter half of the twentieth century and argues that McGahern’s literary spaces relate to his efforts to realise a more accommodating form to envelop the structureless society. While the number of critical studies on McGahern has increased markedly in recent years, research still tends to fall into the well-established camps of social realism or literary aestheticism. This text aims to explore the common ground between the material context and social worlds of each work and the hermeneutics of a ‘traditional’ literary investigation. It traverses such divides through close readings of McGahern’s work, with attention to the topopoetical production of images of the house, the home and the family unit. The book ultimately shows how attention to McGahern’s literary spaces provides a greater understanding of the aesthetic, vision and form of each novel and allows us to understand those aspects relative to the social, cultural and political undercurrents of the works individually and collectively.


John McGahern

John McGahern

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  • Author: Željka Doljanin
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • ISBN: 1526105063
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 235

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.


Irish Autobiography

Irish Autobiography

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  • Author: Claire Lynch
  • Publisher: Peter Lang
  • ISBN: 9783039118564
  • Category : Authors, Irish
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 242

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John McGahern and Modernism

John McGahern and Modernism

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  • Author: Richard Robinson
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1623562597
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

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.


Religion in Cultural Imaginary

Religion in Cultural Imaginary

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  • Author: Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
  • Publisher: Nomos Verlag
  • ISBN: 3845264063
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 343

Das vielschichtige Konzept des Imaginären erweist sich als weiterführende Kategorie, um die Präsenz und Diffusion religiöser Symbole, Weltbilder und Narrative in verschiedenen Medien und gesellschaftlichen Bereichen wie Politik, Wirtschaft, Kunst und Populärkultur einzufangen. Eingesetzt, um die Rezeption und Transformation religiöser Referenzen durch Zeit und Kulturen zu fassen, kann das Imaginäre verstanden werden als geteilter Fundus von mentalen Bildern und materiellen Gegenständen, von Ideen, Symbolen, Werten und Praktiken, die zur Produktion von Bedeutung und dem gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt beitragen. Im Schnittbereich von soziologischen, politisch-philosophischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Zugängen zu Religion bietet die interdisziplinäre Studie einen intensiven Austausch zwischen theoretischer Diskussion und reichhaltigen empirischen Analysen. Mit Beiträgen von Daria Pezzoli-Ogiati, Ann Jeffers, Anna-Katharina Höpflinger, Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, Natasha O'Hear, Davide Zordan, Natalie Fritz, Marie-Therese Mäder, Sean Ryan, Stefanie Knauss, Alexander D. Ornella


Farming in Modern Irish Literature

Farming in Modern Irish Literature

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  • Author: Nicholas Grene
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 019886129X
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 251

This innovative study analyzes the range of representation of farming in Irish literature in the period since independence/partition in 1922, as Ireland moved from a largely agricultural to a developed urban society. In many different forms including poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography, writers have made literary capital by looking back at their rural backgrounds, even where those may be a generation back. The first five chapters examine some of the key themes: the impact of inheritance on family in the patriarchal system where there could only be one male heir; the struggles for survival in the poorest regions of the West of Ireland; the uses of childhood farming memories whether idyllic or traumatic; and the representation of communities, challenging the homogeneous idealizing images of the Literary Revival; the impact of modernization on successive generations into the twenty-first century. The final three chapters are devoted to three major writers in whose work farming is central: Patrick Kavanagh, the small farmer who had to find an individual voice to express his own unique experience; John McGahern in whose fiction the life of the farm is always posited as alternative to a rootless urban milieu; and Seamus Heaney who re-imagined his farming childhood in so many different modes throughout his career. Farming in Modern Irish Literature yields original insights into the literary iconography of rural Ireland and its interplay with social and cultural history, opening up fresh vistas on the achievements of Irish writers in different genres, styles, and historical eras.


Ireland and Dysfunction

Ireland and Dysfunction

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  • Author: Asier Altuna-García de Salazar
  • Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • ISBN: 1443864080
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 275

This collection of critical essays finds itself at the intersection of cultural, literary and film studies, and explores the various ways in which dysfunction is expressed in Irish studies. Dysfunction can be regarded as part and parcel of a portrayal of a landscape of trauma and crisis that may have been traditionally repressed in Ireland at large. However, dysfunction also envisages mediation, managing, transcending and healing. As such, this volume examines how Ireland tackles dysfunction at large, but more importantly, how mediation, managing, healing and transcending help in the understanding of the ever-changing and on-going process of the construction of an Irish identity today; sometimes looking back at the past, but always creating the need of inventing new ways to understand the future of Ireland. The collection presents essays which tackle dysfunction from different and multifarious perspectives that range from sociological, historical and literary discourses to more contemporary insights into dysfunction in today’s Ireland. It encompasses theory and analysis and includes the works of both senior academics and emerging scholars, as well as those outside academia.


Laying Out the Bones

Laying Out the Bones

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  • Author: Bridget English
  • Publisher: Syracuse University Press
  • ISBN: 0815654146
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 251

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.