John McGahern: Authority and vision

✍ Scribed by Željka Doljanin (editor), Máire Doyle (editor)

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 245
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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contributors, including Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished McGahern interview, the collection enhances the existing body of criticism, extending the McGahern conversation into new areas and deepening appreciation of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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
The Woodpile
1 Introduction
2 X: A Quarterly Review and McGahern’s modernism
3 John McGahern: landscape and the lost republic
4 Hand-rails to the past: McGahern and the memory of the Irish revolution
5 ‘What was it all for?’ John McGahern’s critique of Irish republican nationalism: an ethical reading
6 The stranger in the fiction of John McGahern
7 John McGahern’s ‘Oldfashioned’ and Anglo-Irish culture
8 Learning to love the world: the educational vision of John McGahern
9 Love and sex: McGahern’s personal and detached reflections
10 Love and the world: marriage and McGahern’s late vision
11 ‘Extraordinary breathing space’: afterlife vision and redemption in the work of John McGahern
12 Writing violence: John McGahern and Flannery O’Connor
13 The lived narrative versus the learned narrative
14 Inside McGahern’s workshop
15 John McGahern
16 An interview with John McGahern
Afterword
Select bibliography
Index