Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down. Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who’s been fêted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver’s life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children’s drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is—in the author’s own words—a “missionary stew,” marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins’s inimitable style.
Lion images are everywhere. In literature, in religion, in statues, emblems and heraldry. Symbols of them are found in all larger European cities -- particularly London. Many are also in Vancouver, British Columbia. A lion image is visually stimulating and should become part of our life.
Literature and Ethics covers a wide gamut of literary periods and genres, including essays on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as several studies on narrative, but the central ethos emerges from considerations of issues of responsibility and irresponsibility as they find expression in literary study, and in ethics. Students and academics who are interested in literary theory, ethics, narrative form, and issues of authorial responsibility, and how such matters inform the reading of literary texts, will find that this collection offers a wide array of approaches and viewpoints by major figures from the relevant sub-disciplines in literary studies. The collection offers much-timely critical observation on a variety of contemporary authors but also provides critically adventurous commentaries on Victorian literature, and on Indian, African, Irish, and Australian literature. The volume assembles a collection of essays that would illustrate the great diversity of methods by which considerations of responsibility can and do offer insight into a range of literary texts, and theoretical discourses, while also making a contribution to the philosophical question of responsibility (and irresponsibility) in the contemporary world. The collection as a whole testifies to the human fascination with issues of responsibility, just as it testifies to the necessity of posing questions of responsibility as questions of ethics and literature, the necessity of recognizing, in other words, that "responsibility" names a concept whose only ground is the history of those fictional narratives of responsibility and irresponsibility that modern civilization would do well to continue inventing and reflecting upon critically. So whether ethical discourses find expression in theoretical debate--or in and through the sophisticated fictions that constitute an imaginative culture--what is clear, both from wider discussions related to the value of literary texts that are such a central part of contemporary literary studies, and from the varied and nuanced arguments that are made in this collection, is that questions of responsibility are central to literature, philosophy, and the arts, just as they are to the social realities that spawned them in the first place. Literature and Ethics is an important book for all literature and literary theory collections. It has specific resonance for students and teachers who are interested in the value of literary study, and in questions of ethics and narrative.
This study of contemporary Irish expatriate fiction offers a boldly original world-facing rather than nation-focused overview of the contemporary Irish novel. Chapters examine how Irish narrative deals with the United States in a time of declining global hegemony, a rising China and Asia, a thwarted and turbulent Global South, and a European Union that has decisively reshaped Ireland in the last half century. The author argues that in a late capitalist world defined by volatile economic and cultural globalizations, the Irish novel is struggling to imagine new ways to narrate the country's relationship to the world capitalist system and to find new place for Irish writing in the world literary system. Looking at a rapidly-changing Ireland in a rapidly-changing international order, Joe Cleary offers new readings of novels by Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Joseph O'Neill, Deirdre Madden, Mary Costello, Naoise Dolan, Aidan Higgins, Colum McCann, Ronan Sheehan and Ronan Bennett.
Originally published as three separate volumes--"Donkey's Years," " Dog Days," and "The Whole Hog"--"A Bestiary" relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing exquisitely captures sights, smells, and emotions, detailing his life from childhood in County Kildare before his family's economic decline, to his mother's slow, agonizing death; from his travels in England and South Africa, to his two years spent living with a schoolmistress after the end of his first marriage. In writing his memoirs Higgins exposes the sources for many of his best novels, from "Scenes from a Receding Past" to "Langrishe, Go Down," giving the reader a rare look into the "story behind the story." But "A Bestiary" is more than a factual expose--this collection of memoirs is constructed in a novelistic way, creating a work of literary art out of a life.
'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; the third son of four brothers is himself the father of three sons in a family also dispersed, and our author 'looking for the quietness that Julian Sorel found in prison. ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble. DOG DAYS is an account of those two years, with flashbacks to previous diaries that reveal a murky Dublin of whores and Provo killing, a raindrenched Connemara.
Many contemporary Irish writers are discussed in detail in this book, including Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern. Writers such as, Roddy Doyle, and Patrick McCabe are also placed under Imhof's microscope.
In life, Beckett was notoriously reticent, preferring to let his work speak for itself. In the first half of this collection, he reveals many of his inner thoughts and honest opinions about his life, writing, friends, and colleagues in candid interviews published for the first time in this book. He discusses his friendship with James Joyce and his role in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Also included are newly discovered photographs of Beckett—as a young boy, as a teacher, as best man at a friend’s wedding, and with painter Henri Hayden. In the second half, friends and colleagues share their memories of Beckett as a schoolboy, a teacher, a struggling young writer, and a sudden success in 1953 with the appearance of Waiting for Godot. Readers will be enchanted by the poignant remembrances by those who knew him best, worked with him most closely, or admired him for his enduring influence: including actors Hume Cronyn, Jean Martin, Jessica Tandy, and Billie Whitelaw and fellow playwrights and authors Edward Albee, Paul Auster, E. M. Cioran, J. M. Coetzee, Eugène Ionesco, Edna O’Brien, and Tom Stoppard.
In addition to his novels and stories, Aidan Higgins--one of Ireland's most respected contemporary writers--has written a large body of criticism. Windy Arbours includes pieces written between 1970-1990 and is the first collection of his reviews to be published. Incredibly well-read, Higgins covers writers from around the world, from relatively well-known authors such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Jorge Luis Borges, to more obscure writers such as Ralph Cusack and Dorothy Nelson. Serving as an informative guidebook about contemporary fiction, Higgins's criticism is always insightful, and oftentimes entertainingly acerbic.
