Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens and his lifelong poetic quest for order.
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevenss lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this books argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevenss poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed OLoughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevenss literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of world literature as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.
Chapter One: Wallace Stevens and the "Irish Connection": Tradition and
the Search for Order
Chapter Two: In Search of Fictive Order: John Banvilles Scientific Tetralogy
and Wallace Stevenss "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction"
Chapter Three: Solipsism and Accommodation: The Function of Art in Banvilles
The Blue Guitar and Stevenss "The Man with the Blue Guitar"
Chapter Four: Fragmented Vision and New Possibilities: Stevenss "Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and Colum McCanns formalistic experiments
Chapter Five: The Place of the Mind at the End of Things: Stevenss "The Snow
Man" and Questions of Travel in Ed OLoughlins Minds of Winter and Emma
Donoghues Haven
Chapter Six: Myth, Senescence, and the Limits of Transcendental Union in
Wallace Stevenss Late Poetry and Iris Murdochs The Sea, The Sea and The
Message to the Planet
Ian Tan is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He received his PhD in English from the University of Warwick, and is interested in modern and contemporary fiction and the relationship between modernist writing, poetics, literary theory and film. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity (2022) and Understanding Barbara Kingsolver (forthcoming 2023), and the editor of Wallace Stevens in Theory (forthcoming 2023). His numerous essays on contemporary fiction and literary theory have appeared in venues such as English Literary History, Poetics Today, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Textual Practice and Style.
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