Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987 - 2007

ISBN-13: 9781444336207 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 280 str.

Liam Harte

Opis

Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 is the authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last 25 years. Meticulously researched, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of Ireland's most eminent writers.

• This is the first text-focused critical survey of the Irish novel from 1987 to 2007, providing detailed readings of 11 seminal Irish novels
• A timely and much needed text in a largely uncharted critical field
• Provides detailed interpretations of individual novels by some of the country's most critically celebrated writers, including Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien and Colm Toibin
• Investigates the ways in which Irish novels have sought to deal with and reflect a changing Ireland
• The fruit of many years reading, teaching and research on the subject by a leading and highly respected academic in the field

Recenzje

In addition to developing intellectually bold arguments, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel is also enjoyable to read an enviable achievement for any academic book.  There is an ease to Harte s style and a lightness of touch in the way he deals with an expansive range of socio–historical contexts that makes this book deserving of a broad readership beyond the walls of the university.   (Irish Studies Review, 18 March 2015)

It offers an excellent primer in each chapter that I can easily imagine being of great use not only to students of literature, but also to those of us engaged in the work of teaching and studying such works.   (New Madrid, 1 October 2015)

Spis treści

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987 2007 1

1 In the FamilyWay: Roddy Doyle s Barrytown Trilogy (1987 1991) 23

2 House Arrest: John McGahern s Amongst Women (1990) 51

3 Malignant Shame: Patrick McCabe s The Butcher Boy (1992) 75

4 Uncertain Terms, Unstable Sands: Colm T´ oib´ýn s The Heather Blazing (1992) 105

5 Unbearable Proximities:William Trevor s Felicia s Journey (1994) 127

6 History s Hostages: Edna O Brien s House of Splendid Isolation (1994) 151

7 Shadows in the Air: Seamus Deane s Reading in the Dark (1996) 173

8 The Politics of Pity: Sebastian Barry s A Long Long Way (2005) 197

9 Mourning Remains Unresolved: Anne Enright s The Gathering (2007) 217

Bibliography 243

Index 259

O autorze

Liam Harte is Senior Lecturer in Irish and Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (2000; co–edited with Michael Parker), Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty–First Century (2007; co–edited with Yvonne Whelan) and Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (2007). His The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725 2001 (2009) was a Book of the Year in both the Times Literary Supplement and the Irish Independent, and appeared as a Palgrave Macmillan paperback in 2011.

Blurb

This critical study is an authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last quarter century. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of the country s most critically celebrated and internationally successful writers, including Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O Brien and Colm Tóibín. Harte s discussion of these novels addresses centrally important themes in contemporary Irish society, including the inescapability of the past, the troubling legacies of cultural and psychic traumas, the tensions created by the shedding of predetermined gender roles, the re–evaluation of traditional family values and the re–imagining of rural and urban space during a period of far–reaching social, cultural and political change.

Each novel is set in its social and compositional contexts and Harte focuses on the historical and cultural realities of which these works are both a product and a critique. Central to the book s overall argument is the belief that fictional responses to contemporary Irish society have taken on a heightened sociological complexion in the work of the country s leading novelists, each of whom seeks a language, a rhythm and a form to match the angular nature of a society in a state of constant self–examination.