Hand (editor) - Essays on John McGahern: Assessing a literacy legacy

Essays on

John McGahern

Assessing a Literary legacy

Essays on

John McGahern

Assessing a Literary Legacy

DEREK HAND & EAMON MAHER

First published in 2019 by
Cork University Press
Youngline Industrial Estate
Pouladuff Road
Togher
Cork T12 HT6V
Ireland

Copyright the contributors, 2019

Copyright images in Paul Butler and Anne Goarzin chapters
Paul Butler, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo-copying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 to 2007.

ISBN-978-1-78205-329-3

Printed by Hussar Books in Poland

Typeset by Alison Burns at Studio 10 Design, Cork

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank their respective institutions, and particularly the School of English and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, DCU, and the Department of Humanities in TU Dublin Tallaght Campus, for all their support of this publication. They would also like to express their gratitude to Paul Butler for supplying such an evocative cover photograph. All the staff at Cork University Press have been wonderful to work with, but a special mention must go to Maria ODonovan for her expertise, infectious good humour and enthusiasm for this book from its infancy through to publication.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the role of the editors wives and families, Paula and Sophie Dang, and Liz, Liam, Marcella and Kevin, for their love and understanding, which make this type of work both possible and enjoyable.

CONTRIBUTORS

PAUL BUTLER is a photographer living in County Leitrim since 2001. He has photographed extensively within the area of Leitrim and hosted various exhibitions linked to the visualisation of John McGaherns work at venues around Ireland, including The Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon and The Atrium in Longford. Paul is currently working with Eamon Maher on a book which explores the theme of religion and place in McGaherns work through the lenses of photography and text.

A selection of work relating to this project can be viewed at www.paulbutler.me

NIAMH CAMPBELL is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maynooth, and a creative writer supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including gorse and The Dublin Review, and her monograph Sacred Weather: atmospheric essentialism in the fiction of John McGahern is forthcoming from Cork University Press.

JOE CLEARY is Professor of English at Yale University and works in the areas of Irish, postcolonial and world literatures. After receiving his BA and MA from Maynooth University, he took his PhD at Columbia University, New York, where he studied with Edward Said in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Publications include Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: culture and conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2002), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, co-edited with Claire Connolly (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Outrageous Fortune: capital and culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day Publications, 2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Boundary 2, Modern Language Quarterly, Textual Practice, Field Day Review, ire-Ireland and The Irish Review, and he has edited or co-edited special issues of ire-Ireland, MLQ and Boundary 2. He is currently completing two books: Modernism, Empire and World Literature, a study of how Irish, American and anti-colonial modernists helped reconfigure the world system in the period between the two world wars, and The UnsuspectedWorld: the Irish expatriate novel between the American and Chinese centuries, which explores how two generations of Irish novelists have imaginatively navigated the changing contours of the contemporary global order.

MIRE DOYLE studied at University College Dublin where she was awarded her doctorate on the topic of Love and Ethics in the Fiction of John McGahern in 2013. She is co-editor of the essay collection John McGahern: authority and vision, published by Manchester University Press in 2017. Mire teaches literary criticism and creative non-fiction writing and has delivered seminars and workshops at University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, at the James Joyce Summer School (Dublin) and at IES Abroad (Dublin). Writing creatively, Mire has scripted and published two of McGaherns stories, A Slip Up and All Sorts of Impossible Things, for the stage. These were performed in Dublin in 2016 and in Carrick-on-Shannon in 2017.

EIN FLANNERY is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He is the author of four books: Ireland and Ecocriticism: literature, history, and environmental justice (Routledge, 2016); Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption (Irish Academic Press, 2011); Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: theory, discourse, utopia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Versions of Ireland: empire, modernity and resistance in Irish culture (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). His edited publications include: Enemies of Empire: new perspectives on literature, history and imperialism (2007); Ireland in Focus: film, photography and popular culture (2009), and This Side of Brightness: essays on the fiction of Colum McCann (2012). His next book, Debt, Guilt and Literary Forms in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, is forthcoming.

ANNE GOARZIN is Professor of Irish Literature and Culture at the University of Rennes 2, France. Her work focuses on Irish literature as well as on the visual arts in Ireland. She teaches literature, critical theory and the visual arts at undergraduate and graduate levels and supervises post-doc and doctoral theses. She has been Chair of SOFEIR (French Society for Irish Studies https://sofeir.fr) since 2014 and she was appointed as a board member of EFACIS (European Federation of Irish Studies) in 2017. She is the author of, among other books, John McGahern: reflets dIrlande (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002) and editor of New Critical Perspectives on Franco-Irish Relations (Peter Lang, 2015). She is a regular contributor to tudes Irlandaises and other international journals of Irish Studies.

DEREK HAND is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of English in Dublin City University. The Liffey Press published his book John Banville: exploring fictions in 2002. He edited a special edition of the Irish University Review on John Banville in 2006. He has lectured on Irish writing in the USA, Portugal, Norway, Singapore, Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Malaysia and France. He was awarded an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellowship for 20089. His