John McGahern: Authority and vision

Description

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contributors, including Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished McGahern interview, the collection enhances the existing body of criticism, extending the McGahern conversation into new areas and deepening appreciation of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