Touchstones: John McGahern's Classical Style [Paperback]

Touchstones examines the literary influences that led to John McGahern becoming Ireland's greatest fiction writer of the post-war generation.Touchstones examines the ways in which John McGahern became a writer through his reading. This reading, it is shown, was both extensive and intensive, and tended towards immersion in the classics. As such, new insights are provided into McGahern's admiration and use of writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, James Joyce, Albert Camus and several others. Evidence for these claims is found both through close reading of McGahern's published texts as well as unprecedented sleuthing in his extensive archive of papers held at the National University of Ireland, Galway. The ultimate intention of the book is to draw attention to the very literary and writerly nature of McGahern as an artist, and to place him, not just as a great Irish writer, but as part of a long and venerable European tradition.Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Touching Stones: Matthew Arnold and the Canon
1 We Other Clerks: James Joyce and the Classical Temper
2 A Walking Mirror: Stendhal, Horace, Nietzsche
3 One lone paperback: Tolstoy and Religious Sensibility
4 Magic: The Centrality of W. B. Yeats
5 Instinct: Douglas Stewart and Sex
6 The fume of muscatel: Yeats's Ghosts
7 Bohemian Rhapsody: Patrick Kavanagh and Generation X
8 Absurdity: Camus comes to Clones
9 Aristocracy: Andrew Marvell, W. B. Yeats and the Curse of Cromwell
10 The Consolations of Nothingness: William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Prayer
11 Deliberate Happiness: W. B. Yeats and the Inner Life
12 Stranger in Paradise: Dante and Epic Style
Conclusion: What Then?
Bibliography Frank Shovlin elegantly and insightfully weaves a tapestry of allusions and linkages around [McGahern's] work. --Ruth Gilligan, Times Literary Supplement

'This is a smart, convincing, and approachable study. ... Frank Shovlin's Touchstones gives abundant insights intolƒ#