John McGahern: Critical Essays

✍ Scribed by Raymond Mullen (editor), Adam Bargroff (editor), Jennifer Mullen (editor)

• Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 261
• Series: Reimagining Ireland
• Edition: New
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume is a collaborative reassessment of the writing of John McGahern. The contributors provide provocative readings of his major works and also examine some of his lesser-known short stories, essays and unpublished archival materials which have not yet received due critical attention. The book also has a focus on topics and issues in McGahern’s writing that have been overlooked, thus extending the critical discourse on this important Irish author. The contributors to the volume range from emerging voices in Irish literary criticism to established scholars in comparative and postcolonial literature. They share an innovative approach to McGahern’s writings, challenging conventional readings of his fiction.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Communicating with Nature: An Ecosemiotic Reading of Elizabeth’s Umwelt in The Barracks
Habits and Rituals in The Barracks
‘All real seeing grew into smiling […] all else was death, a refusal, a turning back’: Narrative, Death and Subjectivity in The Barracks
The Literary and Empirical Origins of McGahern’s Ecological Consciousness
Emergence of the Self: McGahern and Joyce
Camus’s Philosophy of Revolt in The Leavetaking and The Pornographer
The Caretakers of the Condition of ‘nothing new being possible’
‘[L]ike a shoal of fish moving within a net’:
The Law of the Father
Rebellious Sons in McGahern’s Amongst Women and Driss Chraïbi’s Le Passé simple
The Fact is a Fiction
Place and Modernity in Friel and McGahern’s Short Stories
Gossip and Reality
This is Mine
Isolated Fathers
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index