John Banville
236 pages, 6 x 9
6 color images
Paperback
Release Date:14 Jan 2025
ISBN:9781684485482
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. Banville’s work has been marked by an embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-consciousness of its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts, in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study asserts that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels conjure. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived: that his fiction can be viewed 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.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[S]cholarly solid, shrewd, and inspiring. The broadly conceived take on John Banville’s writing through and with the visual arts is exceedingly valuable and so is the pioneering exploration of the Benjamin Black novels and the detective genre. This monograph is an important contribution to Banville studies and to the broader field of Irish studies.
[A]lerts both readers and scholars of Banville’s fiction to the ways in which ekphrasis is deployed innovatively and pivotal to the unique ontological modes of the storyworlds in these novels. This book undoubtedly opens new pathways to reading Banville’s work.
NEIL MURPHY is a professor of English at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is the editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form and coeditor (with Keith Hopper) of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien and (with W. Michelle Wang and Cheryl Julia Lee) of the Routledge Companion to Literature and Art.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Early Evolution of an Aesthetic: From Long Lankin to Mefisto
2. The Frames Trilogy: The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena
3. Brush-Strokes of Memory: The Sea
4. The Art of Self-Reflexivity: The Cleave Novels
5. John Banville and Heinrich von Kleist—The Art of Confusion: The Broken Jug, God’s Gift, Love in the Wars, and The Infinities
6. Art and Crime: Benjamin Black’s Quirke Novels
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Early Evolution of an Aesthetic: From Long Lankin to Mefisto
2. The Frames Trilogy: The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena
3. Brush-Strokes of Memory: The Sea
4. The Art of Self-Reflexivity: The Cleave Novels
5. John Banville and Heinrich von Kleist—The Art of Confusion: The Broken Jug, God’s Gift, Love in the Wars, and The Infinities
6. Art and Crime: Benjamin Black’s Quirke Novels
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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