Langrishe, Go Down


Book Description

An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) traces the fall of the Langrishes—a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family—through the lives of their four daughters, especially the youngest, Imogen, whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."




Langrishe, Go Down


Book Description

The lights in the bus burned dim, orange-hued behind opaque bevelled glass; ranged below the luggage racks they lit up the advertisement panels with repeated circles of bilious light. A white face that never seemed to turn away was watching her in the glass. Imogen Langrishe, the youngest of four sisters, embarks on a reckless love affair with a charismatic and indigent German scholar. Her family's name has long been a byword for money, status and respectability in Celbridge, County Kildare, but the world is now changing.




Europeana


Book Description

Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism through Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik Ourednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an explosive deconstruction of historical memory. Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, comparing the heights of different forces’ soldiers and considering how tall, long, or good at fertilizing fields the men’s bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and inhumanity, this is an account of history as it has never been told: “engaging, even frightening.” At once recreating and uncreating the twentieth century, Ourednik explores the connections across the decades between the disparate figures, events, and politics we thought we knew. Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana merits the author’s reputation as a giant of post-1989 Czech literature. Now translated into 33 languages, the book is a masterwork of cubism, a polymorphic monologue of statistics and movements and fine print and discoveries that evokes the deadpan absurdity of Kafka and the gallows humor of Hašek. Ourednik has created a mesmerizing, maddening account of the past, and his interrogation of “truth” and objectivity resonates now more than ever.




Point Counter Point


Book Description




The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House


Book Description

This book is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (I800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival. Exploring the uniquely Irish dimensions of colonial and post-colonial societies, Kreilkamp charts the self-critical formulations of a gentry culture facing its extinction—more often and more successfully with comic irony than nostalgia. Kreilkamp positions the Big House novels within current debates in postcolonial criticism and theory. She argues that these fictional representations of a beleaguered society provide a complex, nuanced gaze into a hybrid colonial group that distanced itself from the self-aggrandizements of the revivalists. As she examines the gothic, revisionist, and postmodern permutations of an enduring national form, she illustrates the ways ascendancy women transformed conventions of an English domestic genre into political fiction. Her attention to Edgeworth's Irish works, the fiction of the neglected Victorian novelist Charles Lever, and the gothic forms of the Big House by Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin provide a historical context for later reformulations of the genre by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, Jennifer Johnston, Aidan Higgins, and John Banville.




Cigarettes


Book Description

Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel—and be right and wrong on both counts. What one can emphatically say is that Cigarettes is a brilliant display of Harry Mathews's ingenuity and deadly playfulness.




The Pinter Ethic


Book Description

The only comprehensive guide to the plays of one of the world's greatest yet most puzzling contemporary dramatists, The Pinter Ethic penetrates the mystery of Harold Pinter's work with compelling and authoritative insights that locate and disclose the primal power of his drama in his characters' powerplay for dominance. With remarkable clarity, Penelope Prentice's close reading of Pinter's work untangles the multiple ambiguities, complex conflicts and contradictory actions which continue to baffle, bewilder, and confound critics and audiences. She reveals that Pinter's plays reflect not a vision of postmodern hopelessness in a world threatening to self-destruct, but provoke unguessed choice and action that enlarge the concept of love and link it to justice. Offering a definitive analysis of Pinter's work--from his early poetry, fiction, interviews, essays and novel The Dwarfs to his most recent play Celebration --Prentice demonstrates why Pinter's work can only be communicated through drama where attitude and intention may count for little, but where action is all.




Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980: Volume 5


Book Description

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.




Viva Pinter


Book Description

In his Nobel speech, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, Harold Pinter explained how he was fighting against the «tapestry of lies». It is indeed those daily lies, lies of love or of state, that are exposed in this book, which emphasises his political agenda. In March 2007, the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin) and the ENS LSH organised VIVA PINTER, a tribute to his work centred on a key notion for the city of Lyon, the Spirit of Resistance. Pinter combined a concise, fragmented and syllogistic style with a keen perception of the metaphors of our time. The most specific instrument of this great humanist lay in his representation of power games. In this volume, scholars, stage-directors and lawyers tell us how his work is highly meaningful for them. Golden Palm winners Volker Schlöndorff and Jerry Schatzberg, film and theatre director David Jones, and BBC radio producer Barbara Bray share with us the memory of how they worked with Pinter on his major plays and films.




The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature


Book Description

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.