John Banville and His Precursors

Description

Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osmond – John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions - Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism – and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways. Contents Contributors Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction • Michael Springer Part one: National and transnational currents 1 John Banville and the idea of the precursor: Some meditations • Derek Hand 2 Unknown unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville • Peter Boxall Part two: Literary engagements 3 ‘The vain thing menaced by the touch of the real’: John Banville as a precursor to Henry James • Darren Borg 4 From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond: John Banville reinterprets Henry James • Elke D’hoker 5 Afterlives of a supreme fiction: John Banville’s dialogue with Wallace Stevens • Pietra Palazzolo 6 Effacing the subject: Banville, Kleist and a world without people • Rebecca Downes 7 The limits of simile: Rilke, Stevens and Banville’s scepticism • Michael Springer 8 John Banville and Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Language, mundane revelation and profane sacrality • Joakim Wrethed Part three: Philosophical, theoretical and artistic forebears 9 A fool’s errand: Blanchot, mourning and The Sea • Karen McCarthy 10 Reading Banville with Lacan: Hysteric aesthetics in The Book of Evidence • Mehdi Ghassemi 11 Existential precursors and contemporaries in Banville’s Alex Cleave trilogy • Stephen Butler 12 ‘An earthly glow’: Heidegger and the uncanny in Eclipse and The Sea • Michael Springer 13 John Banville’s ekphrastic experiments • Neil Murphy Index