Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect, but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats, and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s. Through painterly imagery, biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names, Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats's Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomises the problems of identity, bequeathed by Yeats. Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history, Dissolute characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture, modernism and politics.
Autorentext
W. J. McCormack
Inhalt
ForewordPart One: On Literary History1. Cashiering the gothic tradition2. Between Balzac and Yeats3. Swedenborg's ghostPart Two: Le Fanu and his Art4. Mediating the Past: The House by the Church-yard5. The parochial and exotic: two tales of 18916. Beginning the English novels7. Characters beheaded with mottoes8. Towards a theory of public opinion9. 'Freezing brightness'10 Gottfried Schalcken in history and fictionPart Three: The Great Enchantment11. In a Glass Darkly12. Serialism?13. Gladstone and Ascendancy: or, here we go round the upas tree14. Yeats and gothic politicsPart Four: Elizabeth Bowen and The Heat of the Day15. Is the novel properly entitled...?16. Indefinite articles17. 'The neutral island in the heart of man'Epilogue: The Disinherited of Literary HistoryIndex