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Publication Date
1-14-2025
Description
John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, his Quirke crime novels, and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. Banville’s work has been marked by an embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-consciousness of its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts, in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study asserts that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels conjure. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived: that his fiction can be viewed as an extended interrogation of the meaning and status of art and that it is itself representative of the type of art admired in the pages of the novels.
Keywords
John Banville, Self-reflexive, Nietzsche, Aesthetic, Nabokov, Calvino, Kundera, Realism, Beauty, Gender, Female representation, Posthumanism, Intermediality, Ekphrasis, Contemporary novel, Contemporary fiction, Pseudonym, Quirke crime novels, Benjamin Black, Heinrich von Kleist, Irish literature, Literature and art, Literature as art, Visual arts, Long Lankin, Mefisto, The Book of Evidence, Athena, The Sea, The Broken Jug, God’s Gift, Love in the Wars, The Infinities, The Cleave novels, The Cleave trilogy, Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light, Alex Cleave, Ghosts, The Frames Trilogy
Rights
First paperback edition 2025 Copyright © 2018 by Neil Murphy Excerpts from Birchwood. (London: Panther Books, 1984); Doctor Copernicus (London: Panther Books, 1984); Mefisto (London: David R. Godine, 1989). Reprinted with permission from the author, ©John Banville. Excerpts from The Book of Evidence (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989); Ghosts (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993); Athena (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995). Reprinted with permission from the author, ©John Banville. Excerpts from The Sea (London: Picador, 2005). Reprinted with permission from the author, ©John Banville. Excerpts from Eclipse (London: Picador, 2000); Shroud (London: Picador, 2002); Ancient Light (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012). Reprinted with permission from the author, ©John Banville. Excerpts from The Blue Guitar (London: Viking Penguin, 2015). Reprinted with permission from the author, ©John Banville. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Language
eng
ISBN
9781684485482