A History of the Irish Novel
Cambridge University Press, 10/27/2014
EAN 9781107674271, ISBN10: 1107674271
Paperback, 352 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
Derek Hand's A History of the Irish Novel is a major work of criticism on some of the greatest and most globally recognisable writers of the novel form. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern have demonstrated the extraordinary intellectual range, thematic complexity and stylistic innovation of Irish fiction. Derek Hand provides a remarkably detailed picture of the Irish novel's emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows the story of the genre is the story of Ireland's troubled relationship to modernisation. The first critical synthesis of the Irish novel from the seventeenth century to the present day, this is a major book for the field, and the first to thematically, theoretically and contextually chart its development. It is an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history of the Irish novel.
Introduction
a history of the Irish novel
1665–2010
Interchapter
Virtue Rewarded, or, The Irish Princess
burgeoning silence and the new novel form in Ireland
1. Beginnings and endings
writing from the margins 1665–1800
Interchapter
beyond history
Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent
2. Speak not my name or, the wings of Minerva
Irish fiction 1800–1891
Interchapter
Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's The Real Charlotte
the blooming menagerie
3. Living in a time of epic
the Irish novel and literary revival and revolution, 1891–1922
Interchapter
James Joyce's Ulysses
choosing life
4. Irish independence and the bureaucratic imagination
1922–1939
Interchapter
Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September and the art of betrayal
5. Enervated island – isolated Ireland? 1940–1960
Interchapter
John Banville's Doctor Copernicus
a revolution in the head
6. The struggle of making it new 1960–1979
Interchapter
Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark and the rebel act of interpretation
7. Brave new worlds – Celtic tigers and moving statues
1979 to the present day
Interchapter
John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun
saying the very last things
Conclusion
the future of the Irish novel in the global literary marketplace
Bibliography.