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Publication Date
8-2025
Description
This newly updated and expanded paperback edition of the first monograph in English on Northern Ireland–born Bernard MacLaverty discusses his fiction in its aesthetic, cultural, religious, and political contexts. Richard Rankin Russell emphasizes MacLaverty’s dialectic of imprisonment versus freedom, the latter represented by love. Love in the earlier fiction is often perverted, whether in the name of family or Irish nationalism, but after the publication of the novel Cal (1983), its manifestations become more positive and characters are able to escape various forms of imprisonment. Russell identifies three distinct phases of MacLaverty’s career—the visual, the sonic, and a blending of the two—and concludes by showing how MacLaverty’s style, humor, and values enable his deeply humane fiction to model human community. Attentive to language and theoretically well informed, each chapter of this enterprising book analyzes a particular short story collection or novel, and also explores the salient features of MacLaverty’s fiction generally.
Keywords
The Anatomy School, Grace Notes, The Great Profundo, Lamb, Matters of Life and Death, On the Roundabout, Up the Coast, Winter StormSecrets and Other Stories, The Exercise, A Time to Dance, Walking the Dog, Collected Stories, Midwinter Break, Blank Pages and Other Stories, A Love Picture: Belfast 1940, Glasshouses, Soup Mix, Searching: Belfast 1971, Night Work, The Fairly Good Samaritan, The End of Days: Vienna 1918, The Dust Gatherer, Wandering, Blank Pages, Sounds and Sweet Airs, Blackhorns: County Derry 1942, Northern Irish Protestants, Northern Irish Troubles, James Joyce, Dubliners, Ulysses, George Moore, Seumas O’Kelly, Liam O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, William Trevor, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, John Banville, Patrick McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Tom Adair, Samuel Beckett, Catholicism in Northern Ireland, Irish nationalism, Irish school life, Anton Chekov, Denis Donoghue, John Wilson Foster, Matthias Grunewald, Seamus Heaney, Robert Hogan, Irish Republican Army, C.S. Lewis, Michael Longley, Georg Lukács, Michael MacLaverty, John Montague, Stewart Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Ian Reid, Edward Said, Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, Weldon Thornton, Irish Civil Rights Movement, Rescue and Resurrection Narratives, Anne Enright, The Crucifixion, Good Friday Agreement, Holocaust, Loyalists, Virgin Mary, Amsterdam, Gnosticism, Double death story, Marilynn Richtarik, Paul Arthur, Covid-19, Martin Doyle, William Faulkner, Julian of Norwich, Wilfred Owen, William Shakespeare, priesthood, Spanish flu, Stephen Watt, Colm Tóibín, Vermeer, Cal, IRA
Rights
Copyright © 2025 Richard Rankin Russell Copyright © 2009 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp All rights reserved 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
9781684485611