Medbh McGuckian offers an original and wide-ranging analysis of one of the most daring and important poetic voices in contemporary Ireland. It considers the entire corpus of McGuckian’s published work, investigating previously neglected themes, in particular the exploration of creativity and performativity, while also emphasizing the thematic unity of individual volumes in the light of the poet’s constant change and development.

John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, his Quirke crime novels, and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It asserts that Banville’s fiction can be viewed both as an extended interrogation of the meaning and status of art, and that it is itself representative of the type of art admired in the pages of the novels.

Through a close examination of Joyce’s joyous, musical prose, Vicki Mahaffey shows how language provides us with a means of revitalizing daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, everchanging world. A book for everyone who loves words, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.

 

Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world’s best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. This study considers the pioneering ways O’Brien represents women’s experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work’s long anticipation of movements such as #metoo.