Format:
1 Online-Ressource (ix, 261 Seiten).
Edition:
2014
ISBN:
978-1-4725-4411-7
,
978-1-62356-259-5
Content:
"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 monograph will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those interested in the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing. "--
Content:
"Challenging assumptions about John McGahern as an old-fashioned realist, this study confirms him as a writer dramatically engaged with the impact of progress on tradition"--
Content:
Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction 1. Naturalism, Existentialism and Christianity in The Barracks -- 2. The Dark, A Portrait and the Modernist Bildungsroman -- 3. Quoting Modernism in the Short Stories -- 4. Psychoanalytical Signification and Intertextual Passion: The Leavetaking -- 5. 'Low' Modernism: The Pornographer -- 6. Yeats, Nietzsche, Theatricality and Will in Amongst Women -- 7. 'Careful Neutrality': Education and Reticence in 'Strandhill, the Sea', 'Hearts of Oak, Bellies of Brass' and 'High Ground' -- 8. 'The Old Pieties': Modernity and 'The Country Funeral' -- 9. Habit, Memory and Time: 'A Slip-Up', 'The Wine Breath', 'All Sorts of Impossible Things' and 'Gold Watch' -- 10. 'Everything that had Flowered had now Come to Fruit': Modernism, Time and That They May Face the Rising Sun -- Conclusion -- Index
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe, PDF ISBN 978-1-3500-0091-9
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Druck-Ausgabe, Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4411-2578-1
Language:
English
Subjects:
English Studies
Keywords:
1934-2006 McGahern, John
;
Moderne
;
Electronic books
DOI:
10.5040/9781472544117
Author information:
McGahern, John, 1934-2006
