John McGahern and Modernism

John McGaherns work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with making it old rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGaherns statements about the presence of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement with modernist aesthetics. Offering intertextual interpretations of McGaherns six novels, and of thematically grouped short stories, Richard Robinson reads McGaherns fiction alongside writing by Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Beckett, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Chekhov, amongst others. Drawing out the ways in which McGaherns fiction conceals and reveals its modernist traces, this study considers subjects such as low modernism, the complexity of McGaherns time-writing and his dialectical construction of the relationship between cultural tradition and modernity in Ireland. McGaherns narratives of melancholic return are often read psycho-biographically, but they also involve a return to the remnants of literature, including that of the modernist canon. This book will be of interest not only to McGahern scholars but also to those who contemplate the compromised legacies of literary modernism in late-twentieth century and contemporary writing.