Description
Book SynopsisBringing together leading international scholars,
John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville's most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville's novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville's writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel
The Sea to his latest book,
Mrs Osmond John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author's work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment's relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions - Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways.
Trade ReviewJohn Banville and His Precursors includes a number of intellectual delights. ... [it] is the resounding evidence that reading Banville is a life-long pursuit and delight. * Irish Studies Review *
Table of ContentsContributors Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction – Michael Springer, independent scholar
Part one: National and transnational currents 1. John Banville and the idea of the precursor: some meditations – Derek Hand, Dublin City University, Ireland 2. Unknown unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville – Peter Boxall, University of Sussex, UK
Part two: Literary Engagements 3. ‘The vain thing menaced by the touch of the real’: John Banville as a precursor to Henry James – Darren Borg, Los Angeles Pierce College, USA 4. From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond: John Banville reinterprets Henry James – Elke D’hoker, University of Leuven, Belgium 5. Afterlives of a supreme fiction: John Banville’s dialogue with Wallace Stevens – Pietra Palazzolo, The Open University, UK 6. Effacing the subject: Banville, Kleist and a world without people – Rebecca Downes, independent scholar 7. The limits of simile: Rilke, Stevens, and Banville’s scepticism – Michael Springer 8. John Banville and Hugo von Hofmannsthal: language, mundane revelation, and profane sacrality – Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University, Sweden
Part three: Philosophical, theoretical, and artistic forebears 9. ‘A fool’s errand’: Blanchot, mourning, and
The Sea – Karen McCarthy 10. Reading Banville with Lacan: hysteric aesthetics in
The Book of Evidence – Mehdi Ghassemi, University of Lille, France 11. Existential precursors and contemporaries in Banville’s Alex Cleave trilogy – Stephen Butler, Ulster University, Northern Ireland 12. ‘an
earthly glow’: Heidegger and the uncanny in
Eclipse and
The Sea – Michael Springer 13. John Banville’s ekphrastic experiments – Neil Murphy, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Index
