Terence Brown

Tradition and influence in Anglo-Irish poetry

Constitution, language and tradition in nineteenth-century Irish poetry, R.Welch Yeats - the creation of an audience, S.Deane Yeats and the re-making of Synge, N.Grene Austin Clarke - tradition, memory and our lot, P.Denman Louis MacNieces Ireland, T.Brown Patrick Kavanaghs Parish myth, A.Quinn an absence of influence - three modernist poets, G.Dawe Derek Mahons human perspective, B.Kennelly Poetry forms and social deformations, E.Longley the placeless heaven - another look at Kavanagh, S.Heaney

Redeeming the Time: the Novels of John McGahern and John Banville

Part of the legacy of James Joyce to subsequent Irish writers is the inexorable realism of his vision. In Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses there are passages of exacting social and psychological observation — Lenehan and Corley on the streets of Dublin seeking their human prey, Stephen appalled at adult passions released at a family Christmas meal, Bloom cooking kidneys at 7 Eccles Street — which supply object lessons for subsequent Irish writers as to the revelatory powers of fictional realism, its capacity to suggest the density and complexity of human consciousness in its material contexts. Joyce’s realism, it is important to stress, is more than a matter of technique (his own work goes well beyond the limits of realist art); it is a matter of world view. A materialism of a fundamental and unshakeable kind allows him to submit human subjectivity throughout his oeuvre to a searching but almost always compassionate inspection: nineteenth-century conceptions of character no longer obtrude their moral and complacently humanistic perspectives.