Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies articles from March 2006

Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies archives from March 2006

Introduction: John Banville's quixotic humanity.
March 22, 2006... 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' (Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho). (1) Since the late 1960s John Banville has published thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, one travelogue and...

A world too wide.(Short story)
March 22, 2006... Look at this face. I'm sixty and might be a hundred. I take off the make-up and put on forty years. Perhaps I should wear it all day long, like poor dear Micheal. I'd look a sight, strutting about the streets with the slap dripping off my...

From Long Lankin to Birchwood: the Genesis of John Banville's architectural space.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be? (Wallace Stevens, 'Architecture for the Adoration of Beauty'). More than twenty-five years after writing Long Lankin, John Banville, quoting Adorno, offered an indication of what he...

Theory, science, and negotiation: John Banville's Doctor Copernicus.
March 22, 2006... In rereading John Banville's Doctor Copernicus nearly thirty years since it was first published in 1976, and twenty years since I first read it, I am struck by its acknowledged reliance on Arthur Koestler's interpretive narrative of the...

The lighted windows: place in John Banville's novels.
March 22, 2006... Place is an important factor in John Banville's fictional universe: the windows offer vistas of calm or disorder, the houses look mournful and the cities appear as living, breathing organisms. (1) In Prague Pictures the concern with place is...

Well said well seen: the pictorial paradigm in John Banville's fiction.
March 22, 2006... 'Every literary description is a view.' (Roland Barthes, S/Z). 'Language, as trope, is always privative.' (Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement'). By customarily invoking the mutual suggestion of Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria...

Self-consciousness, solipsism, and storytelling: John Banville's debt to Samuel Beckett.
March 22, 2006... Beckett's Example His work rises through the mire of our times like a buried testament. He knows, with Kafka, that so long as we can say, here is the worst, then the worst has not yet arrived. Out of such scant hopes he has built his...

Banville, the feminine, and the Scenes of Eros.(John Banville)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... ... on the surface, that's where there's depth. (1) I fell into a dream. There was a room, cool, marble, tiled, as in a Roman villa... a low table bearing unguents in porphyry pots and coloured glass phials... On the couch, of which I was...

'A lout's game': espionage, Irishness, and sexuality in the untouchable (1).
March 22, 2006... John Banville's 1997 The Untouchable is a re-imagining of the life of art historian and secret Soviet agent Anthony Blunt and is one of a number of novels, plays, and essays meditating on the espionage of the so-called Cambridge Spies. Rebecca...

'Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show': aspects of the uncanny in Banville's work with a focus on Eclipse.(John Banville)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... When we look at Banville's oeuvre we find that his protagonists are all, without exception, prototypes who agonize over their identity or rather over the lack of it. This is reflected in the fact that they feel most at home when they are not...

'Ah, this plethora of metaphors! I am like everything except myself': the art of analogy in Banville's fiction.(John Banville)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... In an earlier study of Banville, I declared him to be a 'poetic novelist', in whose writings 'metaphor is supreme'. (1) Looking back at that study now, I feel that it never really illustrated, even when it tried to explain, what these phrases...

'[P]assing through ourselves and finding ourselves in the beyond': the rites of passage of Cass Cleave in John Banville's Eclipse and Shroud.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... Matters of demarcation tend to be of concern in current literary debate: borders, limits, and states of liminality are explored as interest is focused on, for example, the spaces between that which is alien and that which belongs, that which is...

The Sea: 'was't well done?' (1).(John Banville)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... The Sea is a novel that is likely to leave many a reader at sea. The reviews of the book, by and large, have not been of help in coming to grips with it. Hardly any reviewer has refrained from commenting on Banville's supreme prose-style. But...

Disrupting social and cultural identities: a critique of the ever-changing self.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2006... John Banville's oeuvre reflects his fascination with the figure of the double and the uncanny, the doppelganger, and Nietzschean endless becoming. He believes that, in order to achieve an aesthetic density, the things said should be...

John Banville and Derek Hand in Conversation (2).(Interview)
March 22, 2006... DH: I have a number of questions here and my first one is: Who, if not yourself, are you? (3) [laughter]. No, you don't have to answer that! The first question is: Having written now for thirty, forty years, (4) can you say what prompted you to...

John Banville: a select bibliography (1).(Bibliography)
March 22, 2006... 1. PRIMARY MATERIAL 1.1 Fiction Banville, John. Long Lankin. London: Secker & Warburg, 1970. --. Nightspawn. London: Secker & Warburg, 1971. Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1993. --. Birchwood. London: Secker & Warburg, 1973....

List of books reviewed.(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Bigazzi, Carlo (editor), Studi Irlandesi (Claudia Calavetta) Gray, Peter (editor), Victoria's Ireland?: Irishness and Britishness 1837-1901 (Helen O'Connell) Killeen, Jarlath, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and...

Diarmuid and Grania: Manuscript Materials.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Diarmuid and Grania: Manuscript Materials, by W.B. Yeats and George Moore, ed. J.C.C. Mays. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. lxviii + 1081 pages. USD 149.95; STG 78.50. First, to get it out of the way, a complaint about...

Anne MacCarthy, Identities in Irish Literature.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Anne MacCarthy, Identities in Irish Literature. University Institute of Research in Irish Studies: Universidade De Corufia, 2004. 203 pages. No price given. The present book can be seen as gap-filling to an extent, in at least two ways. On...

Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland. London: Palgrave, 2005. 228 pages. STG 45.00 (hardback). The Faiths of Oscar Wilde, by Jarlath Killeen, is a major examination of the elements of Catholicism...

Victoria's Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Victoria's Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901, edited by Peter Gray (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). 192 pages. EUR 55.00 (hardback). Publications in nineteenth-century Irish history and culture tend for the most part to be...

Carlo Bigazzi (editor), Studi Irlandesi.(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Carlo Bigazzi (editor), Studi Irlandesi. Rome: Yorick Libri, 2004. 158 pages. EUR 20.00 (paperback). This short volume, edited by Carlo Bigazzi, collects ten essays that indicate the current lively interest in Irish Studies in Italy. In...

List of books received.(Bibliography)
March 22, 2006... Arkins, Brian, Hellenising Ireland. Newbridge: The Goldsmith Press Ltd., 2005. 236 pages. EUR 25.00 (paperback). Bigazzi, Carlo, Studi Irlandesi. Rome: Yorick Libri, 2004. 158 pages. EUR 20.00 (paperback). Boss, Michael, Irene Gilsenan...